LeapFish

It took a decade but the search industry is finally adapting to the new web and 2009 was a year of innovation revolutionizing the way people search and interact with the web. The web that once was just a bunch of static websites created by those who knew how to code is now alive with real-time, multimedia content, and it needs a search engine to handle that reality. Driving the innovation is a strong showing in both search usage and online advertising. Today search engines handle 100 billion queries a month worldwide and advertisers have spent $13 billion on search marketing in 2009. Here’s a look back at search’s evolution in the last year ramping up to the new decade.

Real-time content changed everything. Twitter gave everyone with a computer or mobile device the power to update the world on what’s happening now in 140 characters or less. While the information produced by real-time user output alone looked like a big mess of useful and useless information, search engineers started to realize that creating algorithms to sort what’s useful in micro-blogging would be the next big thing in search.

By the end of 2009, every major search firm from Google to Microsoft and Yahoo (Bing) to LeapFish had real-time technology in place. LeapFish took this one step further by allowing users to connect to popular social media websites including facebook and twitter, enabling users to search a single source that encapsulates up-to-the -minute headlines from the most popular sites on the Internet, including breaking news, videos and conversations via a media rich real-time search experience.



The second, and perhaps biggest trend in search of 2009, was that search engineers realized “ten blue links” wasn’t cutting it anymore. The search experience was vastly behind the user experience elsewhere on the Web. With new content being added by the second, it became imperative for search to reflect the diversity and relevancy of content available. Videos, photos, blog posts, real-time opinions, news, audio, social graphs and web applications all belonged in search.

LeapFish CEO Ben Behrouzi saw this early on, telling Media Post earlier this year that ,”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. “LeapFish released its “Living Web” innovative Real-Time Social Search engine in November which offers users a multimedia search experience.

In 2009, search rivalries turned into partnerships and the popularity of search engines got a shakeup. In July, Bing swallowed Yahoo search, giving Yahoo the ability to focus its efforts outside of search and for Microsoft to be the search breadwinner in the newlywed’s battle against Google. The LeapFish Alexa rank has climbed steadily since the company’s launch in November of 2008, with Alexa’s Domestic Ranking in the US indicating that the company has passed other top search engines such as Cuil.com, MetaCrawler and many more. The site’s ranking continues on it’s growth trajectory, now at the 11,186 spot on Alexa, up hundreds in rank over the past year.



What will 2010 hold for search? Look for further innovation in multimedia and real-time from LeapFish. While 2009 turned on search’s extreme makeover, the innovation in search is far from over.