Executive Post by Behzad Behrouzi VP, Technology

Late last year we released a new evolved search experience, LeapFish.  The objective behind the project was to make search more personal, increase social engagement, and most importantly improve content relevancy across a variety of data types.  This meant returning content that not only provides the most value, but also displays content in an organized fashion allowing users to quickly obtain information requested without feeling overwhelmed.

As we all know the internet is rapidly changing however search has remained stagnant and fails to evolve at the rate we all need it to. The idea of customizing/personalizing web pages has been around for years (far before LeapFish even existed).  Unfortunately, very few if any have been successful at it.  Take for example Google with their iGoogle product.  It allows registered users to select from hundreds of thousands of “Gadgets” that have largely been created (but not maintained) by 3^rd party developers.  Users can select to add to their iGoogle start page what seems to be an unlimited number of “Gadgets” that load as independent iframed pages. So where’s the problem and how does it fail?

Since the majority of the “Gadgets” are developed by 3^rd parties there’s no single source for support, nor does any standard exists with regard to design and layout. In addition, from a technical standpoint iframes are expensive when it comes to web page performance.  Since it doesn’t appear like any restrictions exist with regard to the number of “Gadgets” a user can add, a poor un-scalable environment is created that’s slow, heavy, and unstable , ultimately leading to a poor user experience.

With LeapFish we considered performance and organization to be important factors when giving the ability to customize.  We internally developed all the customizable homepage “widgets” (LeapFish’s version of Google’s Gadgets) without the use of any iframes.  This in turn allowed us to maintain the integrity of the product both at the organizational and performance level.  “Widgets” would no longer look grossly different from one another, and support on any issues/bugs is always provided by us. The development of homepage “widgets” is an ongoing project that may one day be opened to 3^rd party developers.

Another concept that held great importance was the idea of socializing content.  Blogging platforms and news sites seem to have this concept mastered however its use was rarely if ever implemented at the search portal level.  We made the conscious choice to make every piece of collateral on both the LeapFish homepage and search results pages “Sociable”.  If your search query returns an interesting piece of content, you can share it with a single click to a variety of sites including Twitter and Facebook.

This leaves us to content relevancy.  As many of you have experienced, search engines today focus on providing a single “type” of result to search queries.  Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing do a great job at finding and delivering relevant pieces of content in the form of web results (hence this is their default search type).  However suppose a user searches “how to lose weight” on Yahoo.com.  According to Yahoo’s algorithm today, Yahoo will return results in the form of type text media.  Unfortunately, given the various forms of media that exist today web/text results most likely aren’t going to be the most relevant or the most valuable.  Now if we do that same exact search on LeapFish.com we are immediately provided top news regarding the topic of losing weight.   LeapFish also provides shopping results that lists books available for sale regarding that topic, and most importantly the results page provides user generated content in the form of Wikihow, Twitter, and Videos.  These “other” data types are certainly valuable if not more valuable than results provided by traditional search engines.

In the end, the variety of data found online is a privilege and a tool. Users now expect to obtain the best and most relevant pieces of content from a single click of a button from a single search. Search is far from where it started and still has far to go in its evolution. LeapFish will continue to build off these goals and focuses to maintain scalability and agility as the internet evolves, providing a tool that harnesses the variety of the web as it becomes readily available.