Google and Yahoo! may be the big boys of search today, but that hasn’t stopped other new search engines such as Cuil from popping up to challenge these incumbents. The most recent entrant is multi-dimensional search aggregator LeapFish.com, announced just last month, that promises to “conveniently surprise users with new-found search information as it combines the best of the web in a single search”.
Type in a search term and LeapFish delivers relevant results from Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, along with blogs, news, Q&A, videos, images and even sites like Ebay and YouTube, all in a single interface.
“LeapFish offers a one-stop convenient solution for more complex searches by querying the web’s most sought-after destinations and rendering the results to users in a surprisingly easy-to-use format,” saya Behnam Behrouzi, President and CEO of LeapFish. He explains that convenience comes in two ways – LeapFish keeps users up to date by offering search results from internet authorities people already care about, and the engine conveniently surprises users with information that they wouldn’t have normally been aware of had they used a traditional engine. “(Hence) users have a more well-rounded set of results per search query.”
Behrouzi believes that accessibility to relevant information is become more and more difficult and fragmented due to the sheer nature of the vastness of the Internet, the variety of the authorities online and the continuous birth of new authorities online. This is the problem LeapFish was created to solve, Behrouzi says, by innovating and delivering value to end users by helping defragment the accessibility of the growing web and keep users abreast of the latest information from across the Internet with minimal work.
Behrouzi points out that LeapFish does not intend to compete against Google or Yahoo!, but instead seeks to leverage what is already working and wanted online. “LeapFish utilizes what already works to capture the breadth and variety of the web and lends more accessibility to what is already valuable to us in the vastness of the Internet,” he says. “We seek to integrate them as indexers in the multi-dimensional search aggregator that we have developed.” Of course, the fact that LeapFish will gun for the same lucrative online advertising market was conveniently left unsaid.
LeapFish‘s search algorithm utilizes proprietary hyper-threading technology to communicate with all major online portals simultaneously to deliver the various search results from a single search query. The current version of LeapFish queries a preset list of online authorities in each search request, including Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Yahoo! News, Associated Press, Yahoo! Answers, Ebay, Amazon, Accuweather and WikiHow.
“Future releases will allow LeapFish to intelligently decipher the search term entered and deliver the most relevant search widgets from a growing list of over 200 currently being developed,” Behrouzi reveals on its future growth strategies. “Users will receive instant results from relevant online authorities in maps, music, real estate, social sites and more, based on the search term they enter.” It is also developing an affiliate marketing system that allows webmasters to monetize their existing websites by integrating a widget into their sites, earning revenue based on the number of unique searches their visitors perform using the LeapFish search widget.
LeapFish is backed by DotNext Inc. which is also funded by Behrouzi, who previously co-founded Reply.com. There are no outside investors.
