LeapFish

» see leapfish.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

LeapFish launched on 3 November 2008 as a search aggregator. You typed a query once and it pulled results from Google, Yahoo, Live Search, YouTube and Amazon into tabs, with more tabs for images, video, blogs and Q and A, plus widgets down the side for news and weather. The domain had belonged to a domain-name appraisal tool since 2006; Dotnext Inc bought it and put a metasearch engine on top.

TechCrunch covered the launch on 20 November 2008 under the headline "Leapfish Launches Another Meta Search Engine No One Will Ever Use", which turned out to be an accurate piece of forecasting. The review's actual objection was simple enough: people already had a search box they trusted, and nothing here replaced it.

A final version arrived in November 2009 with real-time search and a customizable homepage. After that the product stopped moving.

~ the record ~

~ the sales floor ~

Dotnext ran a telemarketing operation out of Pleasanton, California with around eighty salespeople on the phones, selling advertisers a permanent top slot against a keyword. The reported terms were a registration fee of about $1,000 and a renewal of five percent a year, with the pitch that you could resell your keyword later like a piece of property.

So the product had two audiences and only one of them was paying. Searchers were supposed to arrive because the site existed; merchants were being sold a lifetime of placement in front of them, up front and by telephone.

~ the summer it went quiet ~

The crawler recorded the end without anyone announcing it. Through the spring of 2011 leapfish.com answers with the full site at around 13 KB per capture, last seen on 5 May. On 2 July the server returns a 503. By 8 August the domain is serving a different thing entirely, an article farm titled "LeapFish.com - Your Web Presence Search Tools" with pages about choosing a domain name and how to flip domains, which is the business the domain was doing before 2008. In December 2011 even that is gone and the page is parked with sponsored links under the word fish.

On 11 June 2011 somebody posted the question "What happened to Leapfish?" to Yahoo Answers, which is the only contemporary notice of the shutdown I can find anywhere.

~ the older trade ~

I never used it, and had no reason to. By 2008 I was on ttnet broadband with Google as the default in every browser I touched, and nobody in Turkey was going to adopt an American aggregator with a sales team attached. What I do recognize is the shape of the offer. Selling a merchant permanent visibility on a channel that does not have an audience yet is an old trade, older than search engines, and it works right up until the merchant checks.

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