Gigablast, a personal favorite and privately owned and operated search engine, just released the findings of their search “taste test” where the majority of study participants, over 55%, found the Gigablast search results to be as good as, or better than, search results from Google.
- The study compared Gigablast’s and Google’s search results side-by-side, without brand names or logos, with over 220 participants.
- Forty-eight sample search queries were used, with the queries comprising an unbiased selection of the top queries of 2007, as reported by Google’s own Google Zeitgeist service.
- The majority of study participants were from North America (approximately 73% of participants).
Compared with Ask.com’s search results in a separate study, Gigablast performed even better.
- 44% of users preferred Gigablast to Ask.com (versus only 34% of users who preferred Ask to Gigablast).
- Including tie votes, 66% of users voted Gigablast better than, or as good as, Ask.com.
Gigablast says that comparison studies with Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo are now in progress.
“Our users have always been passionate about Gigablast search, but the outcome of these studies represents great validation of the quality, relevance, and freshness of the Gigablast search results,” said Matt Wells, CEO and Founder of Gigablast. “When combined with our intuitive user interface, our industry-leading privacy policy, and our flexible business services, the results of these studies demonstrate that Gigablast is an exceptional search alternative.”
Granted, Gigablast did the study themselves, and this kind of PR does not usually make it to the blog, but like I said, I’ve been a longtime fan of Gigablast and have always considered their algorithm as one of the majors that I track client rankings on. I’m excited to see more coming out of Gigablast.
Comments
9 responses so far ↓
Dan on Mar 19, 2008 at 1:34 pm
I’d LOVE to see a better “compare results to” for the search results. It just takes you to the search on another engine.
Kind of like younanimous…
http://www.younanimous.com/search/web/dan%20london%20adwords/
as on Mar 19, 2008 at 9:07 pm
I would take it more seriously if it didnt look like balls. Relevant results however.
Jaan Kanellis on Mar 19, 2008 at 10:36 pm
I wish the “real media” would take a story like this and run with it a bit. Might scare Google into creating better results for everyone and stop relying on only back links to judge a pages value.
mark on Mar 19, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Awful results! I like the Google ones better.
Nick on Mar 20, 2008 at 2:07 am
Gigablast eats the spider traffic by polling of their bot but gives almost no people traffic… Does anyone consider Gigablast seriously?
Pittsburgh on Mar 20, 2008 at 4:10 am
That’s easy to be ‘better’ when you have 18,000 for seo instead of 19,000,000 with Google…
Wade Young on Mar 20, 2008 at 9:55 am
They turned up a site with no links on the very first page. That doesn’t make sense to me. The search results did not look right to me either, generally speaking. Sticking with Google for now.
Sushubh on Mar 20, 2008 at 12:25 pm
We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later.
This is what I get when I search for something now.
Sean on Mar 21, 2008 at 1:19 pm
“an unbiased selection of the top queries”
That’s probably not the best way to do a relevance evaluation. A random sampling of all queries is a better method. I also think that 48 queries is too small of a sample size. 220 participants is certainly adequate.
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