gigablast and giga bits

[linepie]

We are writing to you because we are trying to evaluate Gigablast, but we have run in to some problems. What are giga bits? The percentages does not add up to 100% - why? What does the percentages mean?
We have also discovered that all the terms in a query doesn't have to be present, even when it is not a patial match. is it because they are in the metatags or what? The number of hits also change within the search - why?

We would appreciate a quick answer.

Best regards

Pi and Line

[Lance Housley]

This from the Gigablast site itself at http://www.gigablast.com/rants.html#gigabits :

Gigablast now generates related concepts for your query. I call them Giga Bits. I believe it is the best concept generator in the industry, but if you don't think so please drop me a note explaining why not, so I can improve it.

You can also ask Gigablast a simple question like "Who is President of Russia?" and it often comes up with the correct answer in the Giga Bits section. How do you think it does that?

And since they are "related concepts" and phrases found within the results, of course the numbers don't add up to 100%. Mind you, the numbers are sometimes less than useful - I have seen a term that appeared to be rated at 137% - if you try to take them seriously as percentages. If you use them as simple scores to assess which are most likely to be relevant, then they are handy.

Gigablast is a really good search engine, and often produces results that seem more useful (and therefore, to my way of thinking, better) than any of the other major search engines, even if its index is only 8% the size of Google's at present. I really like the way it tells you when it indexed a page and when that page appears to have been last updated.

It's other great benefit is that, in addition to its own cache, it includes links to pages cached at the Internet Archive.

[itnerd]

Its OK, could be much better.