Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook

One of the biggest complaints I have with search engines is that a LOT of the material I get is dated. I am constantly searching for news, current events, and forum help postings, and it is SO frustrating to get stories from 2007, 2008, and even earlier. And there doesn’t seem to be any way to modify the search settings by date, none that I am aware of. Plus, many search engines are hopelessly outdated. The Internet has grown, and we with it. With most search engines, we still get the plain old “website” text and maybe a few images or small video results added in. Social networking and social media has really changed the atmosphere of the Net; there’s a lot more information out there from other sources besides the “name brand” mediocre websites. Additionally, the social aspect of the Net makes it so we share more with each other– via Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. I think the traditional search engines are very far behind with that.

So I am delighted, as I usually am, to announce that there’s a NEW search engine kid on the block: LeapFish. It’s pretty nice. The interface is not complex (always a plus), but the search results are excellent. LeapFish draws results from the top three search engine giants, but arranges results in a very intuitive way. For example, I did a search for “Paterson New York” and was immediately presented with a page of highly-organized results: the primary ones were informational, then of recent news. To the side were “Answers” which are the current questions and answers people are discussing related to my search, and at the bottom were video results, Twitters, images, and mentions in blogs. Very elegant and detailed! The only thing I didn’t like was that the videos played when I hovered over them; this has become a common feature for video results, but I’d like to see it changed to an actual click before playing videos.

LeapFish looks like a real contender, and one of the terrific features is that you can add it to your browser. Very easy and convenient. Just go to the LeapFish homepage and look in the right top corner for “Add Leapfish to your browser.”

Here’s a film trailer-type of video that shows you the features of LeapFish. The LeapFish website has much more information about the details of the search engine.