How to Surf
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Most of you know that I am an experienced surfer. I’ve been at it since about 1994, through various platforms and browsers. Yes, I’m an Internet surfer! I’ve never gotten on a physical surfboard, or been on one in the water. However, I did get my own custom surfboard today, courtesy of LeapFish! How cool is this thing?! The folks at leapfish just recently re-launched their site, dedicated to bringing you a single, connected, multi-media experience for both searching and sharing traditional and real-time content.
Of course, since I am talking about surfing, I headed over to LeapFish to do a real-time search to attempt to learn something about it. The first thing I noticed was how amazingly well the results are laid out. Instead of one large and continuous listing of mish-mashed results… everything is broken down into categories right there in front of me. I don’t have to fumble around and click to the “video” tab, or the “shopping” tab. It’s all there.
So I’m seeing news and wiki results first – that’s cool. But I think I want something a bit different. Scrolling down, there are video results next… wait. What the heck is this? Twitter results – in my search engine?! There’s blog results, too!
Yes, you read that right. No, I didn’t typo it or dream it up. LeapFish not only gives you results based on current news stories and dry articles. You’ll also find real-time results based on Twitter and the millions of blogs across the Internet. We already know that those are two of the best, fastest and most reliable ways to get information. Now we can actually find what we need, simply by starting on LeapFish.
There are still tabs across the top of the page, like you are probably used to from other search engines. These tabs can help you narrow down the types of results you’ll see. Do you want only video? Great… they have that. Need some pictures or something from Twitter and Digg? Yep… they have that, as well!
I honestly think you are going to need to try out LeapFish for yourself. Once you do, I think you’re going to want to keep trying it… day after day after day.
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3 Comments
bradleybradwell
November 14th, 2009
at 8:37pm
Chris, if you ever get the chance you might want to visit the West Coast of Vancouver Island. They get some pretty big waves there. Heck, the Olympic flame just went surfing along there. Considering that there’s a direct ferry from the States to Vancouver Island you might want to try it.
Lauren Fisher
November 15th, 2009
at 1:22pm
We’ve seen quite a few of these types of search engine before – Yahoo tried it with glue and I’m not really sure this will take off.
I think this comes down to the fact that we are now experienced searchers – we can quickly disseminate news results from video, image, forum results etc. ourselves. We can do this by scanning and I just don’t think that breaking this down into named categories is necessary.
I’ve had a look around the site and it’s certainly got everything there in terms of social network updates etc.. but I find it a little too busy and not a clean search experience.
bob
November 16th, 2009
at 7:50am
we wait voor a video that you are surfing!!