Gigablast is the latest of the search engines to get a makeover and tummy tuck; in fact, it now brags that "a search using Gigablast required 1/500th the energy compared with a similar search at our leading competitor". Use Gigablast and reduce your carbon footprint...

Following are a few of the key features of Gigablast that make it worth revisiting, if you haven't used it recently.

• "Freshness dating" -- you can select whether you want to limit your search to web pages that have been added or significantly changed within the last day, week, month or year. Gigablast claims that its patented algorithm accurately detects when a page was updated; most search engines' date limiting simply indicates the last time the page was spidered.
  
• "Compare our results" -- unlike any other search engine I know of, there is a link at the bottom of every search results page that lets you re-execute your search on Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com. Wow!
  
• Ability to tweak the relevance ranking -- Gigablast has a very robust collection of search syntax options. One that stands out in my mind lets you search for two key words but specify that you want the results ranked solely by one of the words. So, for example, you can search for web sites that contain both "nanotubes" and "pharmaceuticals", but sort the results based solely on the prominence of "nanotubes".
  
• Human-built directory search -- Gigablast includes links to categories from its directory, based on the Open Directory Project, for search results that are also listed in the directory. For example, the first few results from a search for "carnivorous plants" include links to the "Shopping: Home and Garden: Plants: Carnivorous Plants" category in the Gigablast directory.
  
• and finally, there are GigaBits. These are words or phrases, displayed on the search results page, identified by Gigablast as being most significant within the search results. Sometimes these can help you refine or narrow your search or, as Gigablast says, "the collection of GigaBits might be the gestalt of your query..." Go zen....