Leapfish: The New Search Engine in Town
Earlier this week, I was invited to a webinar that introduced LeapFish to the media. LeapFish is a new search engine that, although launched in November of 2008, recently came out of beta on November 5, 2009. The speaker, Mark Kithcart, did a great walkthrough that showed exactly what this search engine is all about. Now, you might be thinking, “What, another search engine? I don’t need to use it, I already have Google.” That’s certainly what I was thinking as well, until Mark stated that this search engine was not trying to compete with Google. Rather, it was implementing Google into its search results.
However, what LeapFish does differently is pull together searching and sharing. Sure, places like iGoogle allow for things like that, but absolutely everything on the LeapFish site can be shared. I don’t know about you, but I often see pages that I like to share with people. It’s all about grabbing the link, heading over to wherever I want to share it, logging in if I haven’t already, and including a brief note with the link.
Well, that works, but what if I’m in the middle of writing an article with a deadline, or I just went on the computer for a second before heading outside? In such situations, time is of the essence. I would want to be able to share whatever I like on Facebook or Twitter all on one page, and LeapFish does that.
During the seminar, Mark said that the goal of Leapfish was to “Remove the divide between the traditional web and the social web”. Here are some screenshots I took during the seminar to give you a better idea what he means:
Perhaps one of the main things that I like about LeapFish is that you can make a profile that can be shared with others. So, if Jane XYZ wants a LeapFish profile, people could find her at an address such as LeapFish.com/JaneXYZ. The best thing about it is that you can include your own website links in your LeapFish profile, which creates helpful backlinks. If you like a particular news article, you can “like” it, and it gets added to a list of recommended sites. Bottom line: LeapFish is definitely an innovate website that has the potential to appeal to anyone.
