While Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo race to the "Deep Web," another company aims to pool results from all three engines -- as well as other APIs -- and give it a "multimedia" interface.
LeapFish, launched by DotNext Inc. in November 2008, considers itself a "multi-dimensional information aggregator and search portal." More than a search aggregator, says its CEO, LeapFish aims to "capture the multimedia Web in a single interface."
"The Web is now beyond the capacity that is offered by the first page of Google," says founder and CEO Ben Behrouzi. "We live in a multimedia Internet and need a multimedia interface."
To use LeapFish, one selects which search engine's algorithm to use (Google, Yahoo, or MSN), and types a term into the search field. As users type, LeapFish loads new search results (e.g., start typing "Internet" and a page of related results will show up; continue on to "Internet Evolution" and the matching results reload).
While the interface looks similar to Google's ("We wanted to make things look familiar," says LeapFish's director of marketing, Mark Kithcart), the results page shows a variety of information, including links, videos from YouTube, images, news results, widgets, etc.
At present, LeapFish pulls content in from about 20 APIs but hopes to expand to 200. The site also hopes to add a social media aspect, aggregating content from Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Kithcart describes this as "developing a lens for the Internet." As an example, he says, a real estate agent could type in an address and generate information like home prices in that area, a Google street view, related photos and videos, information on nearby schools, etc., on a single page.
Another way the site differentiates itself from traditional search engines is with its business model. Rather than using pay-per-click advertising, LeapFish uses pay-per-keyword. An advertiser pays a one-time fee to purchase a keyword placement, and a 5 percent fee each year to renew it. The advertiser can then resell the keyword down the line.
A criticism of this model is that LeapFish can essentially take the upfront fee and then not perform, making it a bad investment for the advertiser.
"We're not telling anybody, look, sign up, pay the $5,000 registration fee and you're going to get 77,000 clicks tomorrow," says Behrouzi. "Over the next several years we're going to receive more traffic, therefore the value of these keyword positions goes up."
One advertiser, Renata Sogomonyan of QualityNoteBuyers.com, says she looked into advertising with Google but found the sign-up process to have a "million and one rules."
"I'm happy I went with LeapFish," she says. "Profit is not going to show day one or week one... It does take months, but I have a presence on a search engine that's permanent, already paid for, that I don't have to update every 30 days."
Behrouzi says LeapFish sells "thousands of keywords per month." According to Kithcart, LeapFish brought in "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in April.
Of course, long-term, LeapFish faces the same struggle that most new search sites face: getting people to stop automatically typing "Google" into their browser bar. (Perhaps that's why LeapFish's search bar quietly states "It's OK... you're not cheating on Google.")
Further, without developing technology to scan the "deeper Web," LeapFish can only be as good at search as those engines from which it aggregates content.
"We are in some ways limited by the robustness of other APIs we're pulling from," says Kithcart. "The good news is, with where we started, if someone finds a deeper way, cool, we'll pull your API.
"But are we the ones saying we've got engineers working day and night on a deeper indexing? No. That's not where our engineering is actually focused."
— Nicole Ferraro, Site Editor, Internet Evolution
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