Matt Wells who wrote the majority of the code for gigablast is someone I have been following online for a long time. I used to live for http://gigablast.com/rants.html updates. Gigablast being an amazing example of what one person can do given the time and effort. If you look around for articles and interviews by him you get some nice insights that would never come from the likes of Google, although Bing has some very good in depth technical discussions such as how bitfunnel works. It’s also nice to look through the code of it and see how things like porn filters were implemented.

It’s also nice to know that for a while in internet history gigablast was mentioned in the same breath as google. An amazing achievement at the time for a single person against the core google product.

I wish that someone with some design chops could work on it for a few weeks though. Or it was rolled back to the design from around 2006 with the rocket logo. I really liked that design.

I really wish I had the courage to strike out on my own like Matt has. I have written a few search engines, but a general purpose one from scratch on my own hardware is unlikely to ever happen, as much as I would love to do it.

That’s for inspiring me so much Matt if you do read this (notice me senpai!). Oh and sorry for abusing your XML api so much. I was poor at the time and needed some search results.

A few choice articles,

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=988401 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-02-14/google-news-m...