• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 5, 2009

 

If you haven't heard about LeapFish, you soon will. Think iGoogle with a social twist. The latest version of this search engine that launches Thursday merges social content with traditional query data, images and videos.

Registering as a member allows you to customize the home page with widgets, Facebook and Twitter feeds. In fact, more than 25 widgets will become available today, including Celebrity News, Hulu, The Onion, and Yahoo Sports. Those who log in can build a social media profile, a sort of LinkedIn for social media.

LeapFish offers two search options -- traditional and real-time -- to provide a variety of perspectives on news and events happening across the Web. News pulls from a variety of sites. The real-time results from Twitter update as they are posted. Visual partitions separate news, blogs and images on the search query page.

Buttons on the right of the results allow the person to toggle between Google, Yahoo, Bing, Flickr and more. Instead of jumping from page 1 of the query results to page 2 or beyond, the search engine offers an arrow key at the side of each section. This provides a way to scroll forward or back through the query results without leaving the page. While eliminating additional query pages reduces the load time, pulling in a variety of content requires a bit more processing power and time to deliver results.

The engine also allows you to share or recommend content to others with "share" and "like" buttons without leaving the search query. It has been under development for about one year. The first phase debuted in November 2008, but remained a shell until now.

LeapFish CEO Ben Behrouzi says an algorithm that sits above the content providers can identify "a place" and "a thing" when someone types "New York Sushi" into the search query box. The engine calls in data from Yelp.com, an authority on restaurants. The site relies on spiders that crawl the Web, but not for all content.

"This is a new Internet, much different than the days when the original search engines were developed," Behrouzi says. "The days of 1996 and 1997, when we captured the Internet with 10 blue links, are behind us."

Behrouzi says LeapFish's new home page can support 100 widgets and "it will smile right back at you." But if you try to build that on an iFrame infrastructure, he explains, it will crash.

LeapFish will finish 2009 with about $10 million in revenue from its paid advertising model introduced earlier this year, Behrouzi says.

Look for the engine to introduce behavioral targeting advertising in 2010, as well as an online marketplace where marketers and advertisers can buy, sell and trade paid-search keywords, as reported in March. The company will launch the trading platform early next year. The LeapFish advertising model requires marketers to purchase keywords for one year.