Have you ever heard of LeapFish? 

It wasn’t until recently that I learned of LeapFish, a search aggregator that collects information from many of the most popular search engines and provides universal results in one easy to navigate interface.  The site states that “LeapFish’s purpose is to gather, organize and render the most relevant information from the internet’s most valuable destinations for each user search entry, in one single search.”  Although somewhat similar to other aggregators such as Search.com and Dogpile, it has a few unique features and I have even heard that in the coming months users will be able to further customize LeapFish to their needs.

Their goal is not to compete with the huge players such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, but rather to make it easier to find relevant information from many sources simultaneously.  For those loyal Googlers, before you type a query, the search box even states, “It’s ok, you’re not cheating on Google…”

Although the search defaults to displaying web results from Google, you can also click the radio buttons above the search box to display Yahoo and MSN results.

Never before has it been so easy find such diversified results on a topic on one page.  It eliminates the need to flip from one browser or tab the next to find what you’re looking for.  If you do a search for “Weather in Florida”, for instance, you’ll see something like this:

Just in the image above, web results from Google, news results from Yahoo, video results from YouTube, images results from Google and Yahoo, and shopping results from Ebay and Amazon are all displayed.  Not visible in the image above are Google blog results and a section from Yahoo Answers.

Another interesting feature is that LeapFish has “click-free” search, where the search results are displayed on the fly as you type in your search query. Unlike most search engines, you do not need to actually hit the Search button or hit the Enter key. The speed in which LeapFish displays the results is also incredible. 

So, when you have a chance, check out LeapFish for a great alternative to ordinary search engines.

With the popularity of online video increasing everyday, it is not surprising to see people utilizing online video sites to promote their products or services.   More than 14 billion people watched online videos in December of 2008 which was a 13 percent increase over November as reported by comScore Video Metrix service.  YouTube, which is owned by Google, is the clear leader in online video.  While you should be promoting your videos on YouTube, there are a few other channels that seem to be doing the right things and could eventually be contenders for the valuable video market.  Some favorites include:

Vimeo – Like YouTube, you can upload videos, join groups and comment on other videos.  Vimeo does allow you to pay for a pro subscription which enables you to upload more videos per month, and offer your viewers high definition .

VideoSurf – This site is a little different in that you must have your videos hosted on your site and then submit a video feed.  The unique patent pending feature of VideoSurf is that they claim to have technology that can “see” inside your video to index content about videos.  The idea behind this is to ensure that the video that people click on contain the information they were actually looking for.  Many times a user will click on the video thumbnail expecting one thing and before they know it, they have been “Rick-Rolled”. 

Blinx – Unlike other multimedia search engines that attempt to re-purpose technology built for the Text Web, Blinkx uses a unique combination of patented conceptual search, speech recognition and video analysis software to efficiently, automatically and accurately find and qualify online video.  Unlike other sites, you don’t actually upload a video, but if you have video on your site, there is a chance that Blinkx can crawl it and index it for their engine.

By utilizing many different video formats and channels, you have a better opportunity to reach those who are already watching video online.  Videos can also be used and embedded into your other marketing initiatives such as press releases, social media channels (Facebook and MySpace) and email blasts.  Video is very easy to use and can help you to deliver your marketing message in a new and interesting way.

Lately, we’ve been noticing something a little different in Google’s search results with some search queries resulting in more descriptive information in the result. The search result shown here illustrates this:

The normal size for a snippet description in Google’s search results has always been about 160 characters but recently, we have observed description snippets with as many as 317 characters. This kind of result was reported in Italian search results last November and also on Webmaster World, some users reported being offered optional “long” descriptions in results. However, we are seeing these results lately with no special preference settings.

We can only speculate on what is triggering the longer descriptions. We have noted that the longer the search query is, the longer the snippet. So, a search for a three-word search query leads to shorter descriptions like this one:

Two or three word queries result in normal short snippet sizes:

These results are not just local. They were reported here in Florida and a colleague up in Minnesota tells me he’s seeing them there too.

We have noticed that, as reported in the TechCrunch article mentioned earlier, the extra descriptive text is pulled from the page even if the page contains more text in the description tag so we see no reason to change existing Best Practices for description tag length.

Is this just something new that Google is testing or is this a real change in the way that Google displays search results? We’ll just have to wait and see.