Gigablast has recently joined the elite ranks of major search engine companies. The Albuquerque, NM-based company is making a name for itself by offering a variety of search features that are highly customizable, including topic generation and the ability to index multiple document formats.

Gigablast, which is 100% self-financed, has a database of over 1 billion Web pages, that can be publicly accessed from the company's homepage, http://www.gigablast.com/. Gigablast's old database contained half the amount of Web pages it now includes.

The increased database caused a variety of new search solutions to be introduced, so the increased index size could be fully utilized. Among these are Dedicated Site Search (DSS) and Custom Topic Search (CTS). With DSS, Web developers can give Web site visitors search capability for the specific Web site being viewed. Additionally, Web developers can provide root URLs to seed the spidering process of their Web sites. Gigablast intends to spider their site in real-time at the rate of one page every five seconds.

CTS was announced on December 20, 2004 and allows Web masters to tailor their Web site's search feature to a custom topic. The topic may be defined by a list of hundreds of arbitrary sites. These Web sites are entered into the search tool by the Web master and are often related to an area of interest. Gigablast then restricts its search to these Web sites.

The search engine has multiple dedicated clusters, which allows large amounts of DSS queries and Web pages to be handled. Until all of a site's pages have been uploaded to the dedicated servers, viewers may be directed to Gigablast's main index which likely has most, if not all, of the Web site's pages already indexed.

In order to make searches as useful as possible, the company provides what it calls, "GigaBits," unique pieces of related information that can aid visitors to refine their search.