Type of site Metasearch engine Owner Dotnext Inc. Website www.leapfish.com | Available in English Slogan(s) Living The Web Alexa rank 10,723 | |
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LeapFish.com was a search aggregator that retrieved results from other portals and search engines, including Google, Bing and Yahoo!, and also search engines of blogs, videos etc. It was a registered trademark of Dotnext Inc, launched on 3 November 2008.
Contents
Mission and product concept
The Dotnext Inc incarnation of Leapfish based in Pleasanton focused on selling advertising via a telemarketing team consisting of 80 salespersons that leveraged what it called a single experience for both searching and sharing traditional and real-time content.
History
The LeapFish.com domain was originally home to a domain name appraisal service created by Jeremy Harris in 2006; this was purchased in 2008 and rebranded as a Meta Search Engine.
Leapfish (the company) launched in November 2008 and incorporated the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Live Search) as well as other tools like YouTube, Amazon, and Yahoo! Answers.
Leapfish launched its last version in November 2009. The update included features such as traditional and real-time search, a customizable homepage, interactive widgets, and social media integration.
As of February 12, 2012, the leapfish.com domain has been for sale.
Features
Advertising
The main LeapFish advertising programs allowed business owners to display a permanent advertisement on the top of the search results page. The ad space was granted by purchasing a keyword of the advertiser's choice. The space was sold via aggressive telemarketing with the promise that the space could be sold on at a potentially increased price at a later date.
Domain appraisal
Prior to its purchase by Dotnext Inc, LeapFish was home to a domain name appraisal service. In addition to its search tools, the new LeapFish provided domain appraisals complemented with a scoring system. In addition to appraisal values, LeapFish provided domain information such as Traffic Rankings and Unique Visitors from Compete.com.
Controversy
The Dotnext Inc incarnation of leapfish.com had a mixed reception from users of sitepoint forums, from bloggers and other regular web users.
On February 3, 2009, the online blog TechCrunch posted evidence of LeapFish sales representatives intentionally abusing Google's pay-per-click model against potential customers. Ben Behrouzi, the CEO of LeapFish's parent company, DotNext, confirmed the sales representative's actions, but announced that the representative was no longer employed by the company.
The company has also been accused of astroturfing and spamming.
As opposed to other search engines, such as Google or Yahoo which appear to favour web-based sales, Leapfish keywords are largely sold via an aggressive telemarketing operation which has not been without friction with the online community. The telemarketing team consists of 80 sales persons.
The Better Business Bureau rated LeapFish "F" (its lowest possible rating) after receiving 20 separate complaints (some of which remain unresolved). The Better Business Bureau recorded eight separate complaints about sales practices.