Forum Moderators: bakedjake
[gigablast.com...]
so i wonder what the exact role of each of the three is?
My major concern is gigaboost. I know this is one of the few options you have for getting your name out there, and that it does not mean that gigaboosted sites go right to the top, but it still means the algo includes an element that can be "bought" and means SERPS influenced by a factor OTHER than relevance and utility to the searcher - (ie. sites that advertise gigablast may appear higher than sites that are more relevant or useful)
thanks matt. it's a good argument. as long as that edge does not give enough of an edge to reduce the effectiveness of the index, at first glance it should not be a problem, That "random" element however still favors sites who advertises, rather than equally benefits of randomness to all) and if there was not enough edge they wouldn't advertise, especially with the increasing value of site-advertising now.
However the crux of my post was to congratulate you on the results. The important thing with gigaboost is "perception" of the end user. If the results are not perceived to be downgraded by gigaboost, either through experience with the quality of SERPS, or your own promotion of gigaboost there is no problem of course. After all perception IS reality to your customers.
What do you think of my new search results?
Good. It's great to be #1 in a competitive field :)
Hidden text still rules the day though!
Rich
why not give the guy that links to Gigablast a slight edge in this case?
I think this is a good idea for the beginning, but you should be aware that someday this could be a big drawback.
If some major media is writing about Gigablast they'll need something "special" they can talk about. I'm sure Gigaboost is such a special thing - and the result could be people remembering Gigablast as the engine where you can "buy" top positions by linking to it.
Not many SEs around right now where you cannot "buy" your way to prominence.
Mind you, with GigaBlast's bonus for listing, they need the police robot to make sure that the links are not hidden by sites in small transparent gifs.
Yes, if you do the tiny image link thing to take advantage of Gigaboost I'll do a whois on your domain name and me and Julio will be coming over for dinner.
One thing I do note though. If I search like: Keyword1 Keyword2 (note the double space) I get results similar to Google. If I do NOT have a double space, the results are not so relavent.
Dave
For example search for ...books linux... on gigablast then on google. (no quotes or double spaces) Most of Google's results have the phrase "books linux", not so much in gigablast's results, though.
I do have a question for you though... what happens to pages (or sites) that don't exist any more? Do you have a way of weeding them out... in other words do you do reasonably regular queries of sites, even just to see if the page exists?
The reason I ask, is because I just did a query where the first and third places (last index for them were july 4th 2002 and july 5th 2002), both were from sites that no longer seem to exist (either that, or their sites were down... but the question is still valid either way).
That's the main concern that I can see with Gigablast - what's it going to be like in a few years when a lot more sites have come and gone, obviously if users keep getting results from sites that don't exist anymore, any good work you do now will start to unravel pretty quickly.
At the very least, you'll want to make sure you get a buyer for it before that happens ;)
What caused me to try this? Matt said in an earlier post that some of the spammy sites that people were noticing up at the top of the listings may have been indexed prior to recent changes to the algo in detecting spam... so obviously it's a freshness thing.
Will certainly make for some interesting tactics - if there is a site higher in the listing than you that hasn't been indexed for quite sometime, resubmit its URL and hope it will go away... I guess it's one way of keeping the results current, on the competitive terms at least... still thought it was quite funny though ;)
I do see one fairly big problem with this though... what happens if one of your competitors see that your site is offline (even for just a few minutes)... all they have to do is resubmit your url at that time most likely knocking you out of the listing because gigabot can't find the page. Could take you a while before you realise and resubmit again.
Good observation. If your competitor's page went down and you resubmit their page it will have no affect. Gigablast will notice that the connection timed out or was refused and won't do anything. If the server returns a 404 then, yes, you could remove the page by resubmitting, but the 404 means that the page is gone anyhow, so, in that case, thanks for keeping the index fresh.
It is difficult to keep such a large index fresh on only a T1 (1.5Mbps) connection, but I'm doing the best I can until I can get someone to help out with the infrastructure.
The main difficulty I see with your results right now probably has to do with the limitations of size... I'm not seeing results for interior pages that I see ranking on other engines, even when I do some exact searches. I'm guessing that you may only index the more prominent pages on a site (analogous to the way Google's fresh results show up for higher PR pages)... or else, as your index has grown, it now takes you longer to index an entire site.
Otherwise, I feel the results are impressively good, not just because I can find my own sites ranked the way I'd like ;), but because I can really use the engine to find useful information.
Man, I think in a few days if Google doesn't keep up, Giga Blast will be the best search engine on the web!
in Giga Blast, I found 4,930,716 results
Doing a search on Gigablast with an boolean AND you'll get about 700,000 results for your query.
