It's been down for over a week. Domain and IP still there, just nothing listening on ports.
IIRC they were a bit of a thing shortly after Alltheweb and Google were fighting over who had the largest index, probably when they gained the most notoriety.
Wow. I hope they come back up. They were kind of stagnating for years but in recent years seemed to find more funding. It was hard to judge since they always kept secret about what exactly their plans were and the size of their index. Their algo seemed to have improved in recent years too.
We put up a blog post about it, and someone posted it on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35977322
It's sort of amazing how little talk there is about disrupting the status quo.
I didn't see any mention from any of the alleged search engine news sites. And they pretty much ignore all the alt search engines.
Neeva also set to disapppear
https://neeva.com/blog/may-announcement
As the founder is an ex-Googler, it might get some more attention.
Big Tech owns the operating systems, the browsers, search engines, ad networks and can pay others like Apple for exclusive default placement on their devices and software. It's going to take either regulation or anti-trust breakup to get that to change.
*Depressing*
>depressing
It is a bit. Just 1% of the market is about 90m queries a day, at $5CPM that's $13.5M a month. Google make about 10x that with their critical mass of advertisers.
The gist I get from Neeva is that they were unfocused, and flouncing between fads.
Haven't heard anything from or about Gigablast though.
The customer acquisition thing is definitely key. And convenience. I'd say to people, especially tech people- if they could donate 1 of 100 searches to another source, it'd promote some more competition. G have it pretty much wrapped up as the browser defaults etc.