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Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

From the about page: "Now Gigablast has grown to several, highly-talented employees" So not quite one guy.

That said, after having read some of the comments on the page I think we should cut the guy (or guys) some slack. As jacquesm's link points out 55% of users in a double blind study found gigablast better than Google. We're talking about a couple of guys matching, and maybe beating, one of the worlds biggest software companies at their own game. A couple of guys matching Google's thousands of employees and thousands of servers.

In a word I think they're absolutely fucking awesome and deserve total and absolute respect.

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They're not really competing with Google. Their big business model seems to be setting up a Gigablast cluster for customers to index a custom collection of info, a la the Google Search Appliance, but more vanilla. Further, they're not doing mail, or news, or reader, or wave, or groups, or chat, or android, or chrome, or GWT, or adsense, or youtube, or iGoogle, or docs, or app engine. So yeah, they have fewer employees, but they're not exactly doing the same set of things either - they're really focusing on performance in one area: search. Google may be about search, but they do a lot more than that.

The 10K makes it pretty clear: Google's in the advertising business, period. They hardly sell any search appliances.

If they are better than google and nobody cares, that is a frightening thought.

No, that's part brand recognition, part comfort and part trusting etablished companies.

Are they better than google at search (which is what I think you meant)?

Can they scale what they have to serve the number of SERPs that Google serves? Can they do that cost effectively? Can their algorithms produce as useful results in the face of "optimisations" by 10's of thousands of SEO/SEMs across the globe?

I'm guessing no.

My wife makes the most awesome gingerbread men (and brownies) but that doesn't mean she can put Greggs out of business.

Still props too them, they're doing something awesome.

I always thought that to beat google you would have to be better by a huge margin. So even if its true that this searchengine performs 5% better (whatever that measures) it's not enough to convince people to switch.

"blind test" doesn't work. Read "blink: The power of Thinking without Thinking" by Malcolm Gladwell.

"blind test" doesn't work.

Please explain.

Based on what I understand from this presentation:

http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce...

Gladwell means that people don't always know what they want (or wont be able to tell you).

Always is the operative word in that sentence. Most of the time they know quite well what they want, sometimes they don't.

I read Blink. Gladwell need to remember that the plural of anecdote is not data.

He certainly raises some questions about blind tests compared to expert opinion, but as far as repeatable, replicable, methodology goes, my trust is in the blind test.

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