LeapFish and Make-A-Wish Foundation^® team up with Twitter users to help fund an ill child’s wish to go to Disneyland

PLEASANTON, Calif. – November 16, 2009 – LeapFish has joined forces with the Greater Bay Area Make-A-Wish Foundation^® to adopt an ill child’s dream and help make that dream come true. Tweet-a-Cause, a social media initative, will give Twitter users the power to help fund an ill child’s dream to go to Disneyland, one Tweet at a time.  LeapFish will make a donation per Tweet sent to the Make-A-Wish Foundation until $10,000 has been raised and the child and his family can go to Disneyland. LeapFish is inviting people to tweet to raise awareness of children that need your help.  LeapFish will make a donation to create magic and make their wishes come true.

Jacob, age 4, has a rare and life-threatening disease that has affected him since birth. He has one big wish in life –- to go to Disneyland with his family.  LeapFish and the Make-A-Wish Foundation have joined forces to help fund his wish through Twitter.  “We are privileged to be able to make a difference in young Jacob’s life by helping to fund his wish,” said Ben Behrouzi, CEO of LeapFish. “What better tool than Twitter to get the community involved and allow everyone to share in making a difference for someone,” said Behrouzi.

The Make-A-Wish Foundation of America is the largest wish-granting organization in the world. The Foundation has granted wishes to more than 174,000 children with life-threatening medical conditions nationwide. Through the Adopt-A-Wish^® program, a donor, such as LeapFish, can cover the entire cost of a child’s wish. To raise awareness of the Adopt-A-Wish program and to help get the social media community involved in granting an ill child’s wish, LeapFish is sponsoring the Tweet-a-Cause and Make-A-Wish campaign.

The campaign will run from November 16 through December 4th, 2009. LeapFish invites people to Tweet-A-Cause to honor Jacob’s wish.

For more details on the campaign and how to help visit LeapFish.com/MakeAWish

About LeapFish

LeapFish is an evolved search engine that captures the traditional, multi-media and real-time Web, through a single, connected search platform for both searching and sharing content.  Founded by Ben Behrouzi (co-founder of Reply.com), LeapFish is a privately held, 100-person corporation headquartered out of CARR America Corporate Center in Pleasanton, California. For more information, visit blog.leapfish.com.

About Make-A-Wish

The Make-A-Wish Foundation grants the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions to enrich the human experience with hope, strength and joy.  For more information, visit www.makewish.org.

Zakta has been selected as “Cool Site of the Day”.

Please cast your vote for Zakta here – voting is valid only today, November 14th 2009 – and pass the word along. Thank you for your support!

Here is the blog post here announcing this.

Have you searched for in-depth information on the Web lately only to get back results that were mostly sales pitches, regurgitations of a single article that wasn’t very informative in the first place, woefully out-of-date pages, or bait-and-switch sites that didn’t even mention your search term? Is there any hope of getting useful and trusted resources for what you are searching for?

Brian Solis wrote about the rapid evolution of search (also here) citing the flurry of activity in the search industry around such capabilities as real-time search, social search and semantic search.  In my personal opinion, one big issue that hasn’t received much attention is the one I raise above – what is going to help people with their searches for in-depth information on the Web?

Zakta, our personal and social Web search engine, offers a way that makes Web searching useful, purposeful and fun.  As I’ve written before, Zakta helps with these deeper informational searches, by presenting organized information for your search queries, enabling you to personalize the results, save them for later use and even share the search results you’ve found useful with friends, family, workgroups and the world.

A few weeks ago, Matt Hurst wrote on his Datamining blog that Zakta was a new way to organize Web knowledge and might be part of a set of emerging tools for what he calls “web gardening“.  I wanted to elaborate on this part of Zakta, by introducing Zakta Guides, the social media tool in Zakta that enables organization of resources from the Web on any topic, and all the benefits it brings to people everywhere and to the authors of Guides in particular.

On Zakta, no matter what topic you are searching on, you can collect the best Web sites, news articles, blog posts, products, companies, services, videos, images, whatever is relevant and useful for your search, and organize and share it in the form of a Guide with others. When other users look for similar information, Zakta presents your Guide (or other matching Guides created by other Zakta users) in their search results.  i.e. Others can benefit from the results of your searching effort, and begin their search with what you have found useful.

In turn, other users can vote and recommend your Guide, share it with others, and even suggest new resources to add to your Guide, so you and everyone else can benefit from what others have discovered. Users who like certain Guides can subscribe to them so they can stay on top of updates and additional search results. A really powerful capability in Zakta is that you can even invite other people you trust – friends, family members, co-workers, and associates – to collaborate with you and add to and edit your Guide. In this way, a Zakta Guide enables the best information from the Web to be organized in one place for a given topic.

See these interesting Zakta Guides that people have created so far.

There are Guides on a diverse range of subjects such as these:

• Niagara Falls
• Lucille Ball
• U.S. political satirists from the 1950s-today
• Financial Aid 101 (part of a collection of Zakta Guides on College Planning Made Easy!)
• Finding a Job in an Economic Downturn
• Chess
• Ivory Soap Advertising History
• Gay Marriage in the United States

When you organize and share the best resources from the Web on a topic you are interested in, you make it easy for others to search on that topic. Likewise, you benefit from what others have shared.  Imagine if everyone decided to share what they’ve found useful from their searches on topics they know about using Guides!  Just how much more useful the search experience can be for everyone!  Jason Falls mused about the game changing possibilities this kind of approach to getting curated search results in his recent post on Zakta. And Jason was right in arguing that this will require that people come to Zakta.

I can cite three reasons why Zakta can be very useful to you:

1. Help yourself with a personalized searching experience that saves you time with your deeper searches for information.  Who wouldn’t want to save time in this ever-demanding world we live in!
2. Help others by sharing what you know or have found. You will likewise benefit from others doing the same.  This is a win-win proposition coming from a search framework that lets people help each other!
3. You can offer more value to your current visitors, reach more searchers on the Web, and engage your followers better in social networks!  This is a big, practical benefit for you, and here’s how Zakta enables this:
   • Zakta Guides can be linked from your blog, Web site, or social network page, to offer additional information to new and recurring visitors alike.
   • Here’s the big kicker - If your Guides are good, it will be automatically indexed by other popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and others – this means that users searching on the Web using these popular search engines for matching topics will find your Guides in the search engine results page, and benefit from your Guides.

By combining a personalized search engine with a social media tool in the form of Zakta Guides, and a social network to let you connect with people you trust, Zakta makes it possible for people to make a difference in the quality of the search experience for themselves and everyone else.  The overarching benefit for the Web as a whole is that Zakta can help organize the chaos of the Web, one topic at a time!

I invite you to dig deeper into Zakta and experience these benefits for yourself.  As always, we’d love to hear feedback and what we can do to make Zakta better for you.

Silicon Valley Search Startup Comes Out of Beta & Debuts First Real-Time, Multi-media, Social Search Engine Combining Searching and Sharing

PLEASANTON, Calif. – November 5, 2009 – LeapFish, an upcoming search and social media innovator, today unveiled the new multi-media and real-time search, communication, and sharing platform that gives consumers the most convenient, fun, and personalized way to experience and share the traditional and real-time Web – the new “Living Web.”

The LeapFish search experience empowers consumers with the ability to manage the two things they do most often online:  “search” and “share.” “Real-time and social are major movements and its time consumers are empowered with an ability to share to the real-time and social Web when they are most engaged – while searching the Web,” said Ben Behrouzi, Founder and CEO of LeapFish.

The new search platform seamlessly combines the ability to search and share real-time and traditional content in any media format in a single interface across a range of different sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Digg).

“Aside from the Web’s growing size and variety there is an emerging duality of “real-time” and “traditional,” which now requires a completely different search experience.  One that includes both the content and the “contributor” in the search experience, such that both traditional and real-time searching and sharing are integrated seamlessly in our use of this Living Web,” said Behrouzi.

The new LeapFish search experience offers consumers a real-time search engine, a technically advanced customizable personal homepage, more multi-media results from the entire Web and the ability to share any piece of content found online.

LeapFish Search Engine Features :

Real-Time Search Engine : A fresh multi-media real-time search engine capturing results from all containers of real-time content (e.g., Twitter, YouTube, Twitpic, Flickr).

Searching and Sharing : Easy and convenient sharing features empower users to merge traditional content into the social and real-time Web as they search and find content anywhere online (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Digg).

Variety of the Web : Delivering rich multi-media content from the deep and wide new Web via integration of leading authorities in website aggregation, videos, images, news, blogs, tweets and much more on every search query (e.g., YouTube, CNN, Twitter).

Personal Internet Dashboard : Technically advanced customizable personal homepage allowing consumers to build their own dashboard to the Internet by adding multiple news feeds, blogs, applications, tools and more (e.g., Facebook Application, Twitter Application, Mashable Feed).

Until a few years ago consumers came to the Web to just search for simple information.  Now the Web is a place where people come to also share information.  Information today that is multi-media and more complex in nature.  “LeapFish refers to this new place as The Living Web, and has developed an evolved search engine to help consumers get the most from it – a service to help consumers Live the Web,” said Behrouzi.

To try the new search experience for yourself, visit http://www.leapfish.com/.

It is hot!  So hot that Google legitimized it with their recent update.  Buzz is building on social search like never before, as this handy trend graph from BlogPulse indicates:

But what is social search?

According to different industry voices, social search …

“… involves combining social graph information with pure algorithmic search results.“

“… combines traditional algorithm-driven technology with online community filtering.“

“… helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle.“

“… is information retrieval, way finding tools informed by human judgment.“

These definitions are quite broad and varying, and the result is that so many solutions have come under the banner of “social search”. However, one thing common across these diverse set of tools and services is this: they’ve all used collective intelligence (wisdom of the crowds, if you will) in some way to improve what they present to users in the search process.

Microsoft Announces Facebook and Twitter Partnership with Bing.

Google Comebacks with Twitter Partnership.

The fight is over social search engines, aka the next level of searching the web. Basically, how can one optimize Twitter, Facebook and whatever else into one easy search engine to find easy, relevant and current (as in NOW NOW) info. This will be very interesting to see who comes out on top, and whether this really affects how people search (which in term affects everything on the web).

Silicon Valley Search Startup Plans to Launch Game Changing Real-Time and Multimedia Social Search Engine in the Coming Weeks

PLEASANTON, Calif. – October 15, 2009 – LeapFish, a respected pioneer in multimedia search, today announced plans to unveil a new multimedia and real-time search, communication and sharing platform.  The vastly evolved search engine will fundamentally enhance the way people both search and share information on the Web today.

In recent months, real-time communication has emerged as a major focus for the world’s biggest and most innovative Web companies; from Web and search giants like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, to innovators in social media such as Facebook and Twitter.  The LeapFish platform will be a new milestone in the consumer Web marketplace.

The near 100 person company announced that the new search platform has been under heavy development in 2009 by its lead engineering team, including developers from Ask.com.  Exact details surrounding a feature set or how the new search platform works have not yet been released.

Launching soon, LeapFish will begin presenting previews of its new search platform in late October.

About LeapFish

LeapFish is a new multimedia search engine that captures the variety of the web in a single search platform. LeapFish is founded by Behnam Behrouzi, also cofounder of Reply.com.  LeapFish is a privately held corporation headquartered out of CARR America Corporate Center in Pleasanton, California. For more information, visit blog.leapfish.com.

Almost everyone who uses the Internet uses it at some point to search for something. But there’s a difference between transactional searches — the search for a specific fact, such as the price of an item, a map or the phone number of a local business – and deeper, more involved, informational searches.

Informational searches usually involve the hunt for information on topics or subjects that don’t usually lend themselves to a single or specific answer. Informational searches can be very broad, such as cars or mp3 players, or they can be narrow, such as caribbean destinations or voip service options for small business. And they can be everything in between. Usually, a person has to sift through one or more Web pages to find what they are looking for. Typically, informational searches are time-consuming. Sometimes, they’re downright frustrating.

Here are 7 ways to improve informational searches.

1. Start with organized search results
2. Explore the topic of your query with related topics and subtopics
3. Own and control the search process and results completely
4. Save what you’ve found, and save time when you return to search again
5. Share your knowledge and findings with others
6. Collaborate with people you trust
7. Connect and stay informed

Do you find these ideas to improve informational searches appealing? What other ideas do you have to improve informational searches?

Please take Zakta for a spin and let us know what you think. Zakta is just in public beta now, and we are eager to hear from you about your opinions and what we can do to make Zakta work really well for your informational searches.

“Innovation in search has just begun”, Michael Arrington wrote in May 2008. He was right! The last 12 months have seen a lot of amazing tools come to market, after what seemed like a lull in search engine innovation during the previous 5-6 years. From steady innovations at Yahoo or Ask, to an ambitious attempted Google-killer from Cuil, to Wolfram’s Alpha, to Google’s own myriad innovations in search including Google Squared, many promising startups, and most recently, Microsoft’s Bing, the market seems humming again with search engine innovations.

Into this space of frenetic innovation in search, we introduce Zakta, a personal and social Web search engine. Zakta helps people find information better from the Web, by blending rich algorithmic Web search, with information organization, personalization, information sharing and collaboration.

In effect, Zakta takes a different approach to Web search by infusing deep personalization of search results, social media and social networking into a holistic solution for informational searches.

But, does the world need another Web search engine?

The Web has become a really big place, and there is an ever-present need for good search tools to harness all the information coming online:

• The amount of content online is growing explosively, estimated at a trillion pages of information and growing steeply every day.
• Social media has fundamentally shifted the equation as user-created content heralded the so-called Web 2.0 phenomenon, bringing even more content online faster than ever before.
• Multimedia, local information, content in different languages, specialized databases and repositories all add to the staggering diversity of content now available online.
• The social networking phenomenon has become very entrenched and has promoted even more content creation and sharing in networks like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and others.

The world might not need one more generic me-too Web search engine, but what these trends says to me is that there is room for innovative search tools that will solve specific needs.That is why the market today is alive with many investments in search startups as well as continued innovations from the entrenched players.

So, what specific need does Zakta solve?

People have two kinds of experiences with Web search today.

With the first kind, they get instant gratification for their queries. For example, look for a company name like Cisco, and you get its Web site link as the first hit quite often, and these days, you even get instant access to contact information and possibly even other relevant information stock quotes or a map right away.

With the second kind, there’s a good chance people will spend a lot of time trying to get what they were looking for, and possibly get quite frustrated with the search effort. For example, look for information on a topic like college financial aid, or the voip service options for small business, or your next vacation destination and you’ll more than likely be sifting through lots of results, of probably more than one query, trying to get what you want.

Search industry experts know of this phenomenon.

• Transactional searches, as the first class of searches are sometimes called, lend themselves to a very specific answer, and given the wealth of information available online, a sophisticated enough engine can find the answer. For simplicity, I’ve combined factual searches (queries to find a specific fact like the 32nd US president) and navigational searches (queries to find a specific web site like singapore airlines) into this group, because they lend themselves to a very specific answer.
• Informational searches, as the second class of searches are sometimes called, do not lend themselves to a very specific answer. Here, the wealth of information on the Web can actually contribute to information overload, especially given that the information is usually not organized for easy consumption. It also doesn’t help that today’s search tools don’t go very far in supporting the processes that users take to find the information they want.

Zakta is focused on solving the problem with informational searches.

How does Zakta help with informational searches?

I believe that there are many things missing in today’s approach to search, that contribute to the informational search problem:

• Information on the Web is disorganized, and this tends to make it more complex for a person to find easily what they need.
• Searching for information is a process, and today’s tools do not support the process. For the most part, the search results page tends to be read-only (exceptions are there, of course) and leaves all the “sifting” to be done within a person’s mind or using outside tools like bookmarking, text notes, emails, post-its etc.
• Search engines haven’t traditionally involved the people they serve, so they are unable to leverage knowledge that people have to improve the searching process to their specific needs, and they are unable to let people leverage knowledge from others they trust

With this understanding, we designed Zakta to help a person with their informational searches in layers:

1. Start with organized search results
2. Explore the topic of your query with related topics and subtopics
3. Own and control the search process and results completely
4. Save what you’ve found and save time when you get back
5. Share your knowledge and findings in the form of Zakta Guides
6. Collaborate with people you trust
7. Connect and stay informed

By putting the searcher and people they trust into the searching mix, Zakta makes a noteworthy departure from traditional Web search engine design.

I’ll be sharing more information on each of these benefits in future blog posts.

What is the status of Zakta?

Zakta is now in public beta, having gone through 22-months of open development with user input since August 2007. We are committed to the principle of continuous improvement, and have been making steady improvements to the capabilities as well as user experience.

We want Zakta to be extremely useful for your informational searches. Our intention is to serve lots of very happy users with our system.

Early user feedback indicates that people like what they see with Zakta, but also indicate that there’s more room for simplifying our interface. We’ve been hard at work to listen and adapt as fast as we can.

And to this end, we value your feedback greatly. So please take Zakta for a spin and let us know.

The people behind Zakta

Zakta is a labor of love and passion for me. I am Sundar Kadayam, and am Founder and CEO of Zakta. Prior to Zakta, I was co-founder and CTO at Intelliseek and then at Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

I’m joined in this effort by some amazing people who I respect dearly.

Mark Reed, CTO of Zakta, is a brilliant software architect with a rich track record of building and supporting large scale, commercially successful systems. His background in distributed systems, search engines, text analytics, social media and databases provide the relevant base of knowledge upon which Zakta is built.

Mahendra Vora, serial entrepreneur and owner of many companies, and my partner and co-founder from Intelliseek is a partner and Chairman of Zakta, and continues to be a mentor on a wide range of topics.

I also have the good fortune of having the advice and support of many industry veterans, who I’ll call out in future blog posts.

Zakta is a TINY company, operated out of Cincinnati, Ohio, my home of over 20 years.

BTW: The name “Zakta” is derived from the word “Exactly”!

By Roi Carthy, Techcrunch.com

Social search engine Delver, which we placed on death watch a month and a half ago has been acquired by Sears in a last minute play right out of left field.

Israeli business media is reporting that as part of the deal, Delver CEO Liad Agmon will move to Chicago where he will hold a title of VP at Sears Holdings. Delver itself will become an R&D center for Sears and will continue to develop its social graph search engine, as well as additional products. It is not clear what Sears wants to do with Delver. Perhaps it will turn it into a social product search engine, or maybe it just likes the idea of buying an Israeli R&D team on the cheap.

The purchase price is unknown but it’s safe to assume it could not be very high considering the company was literally days from being shut down. The bright side of course is that Delver’s remaining 20 employees will not join the unemployed in Israel.

The company has raised $4 million from a single investor, Carmel Ventures.

Traditional search engines treat the Web like a library, often returning results from highly-referenced, dependable resources such as Wikipedia.

OneRiot the social search engine that finds the pulse of the Web.Read more

Lots of time and thought goes in to running a search engine, and an equal amount of consideration must go in to creating a social network. But what about when the two are added together? We at Scour would like to provide our users with the very best in content and give them the arena to voice their opinions on the search results they are receiving.

We recently spoke with Susanne Koch from Pandia Search Engine News about the thoughts that go in to running Scour. You can view the interview here.

Thanks to Susanne for taking the time to speak with us!

-The Scour Team

It is our continued mission at Scour to build a search community, one that fosters communication between the user and search results to order to create the best search experience possible.  After all, how can we call ourselves a social search engine, if it lacks that critical communication?

Keeping with this theme, AltSearchEngines wrote a great piece on Scour and the value of human-powered search a few days ago.  We’re glad to see they recognize that Scour is truly a social search engine relying on the Scour user community to make the results better.  Check it out and let us know what you think.

Thanks to AltSearchEngines for the write-up!

-The Scour Team

There are multiple ways today to find information on the web. There are different kind of information to search for. The  search task experienced could be overwhelming, frustrating, long and tiring or fun, efficient and successful. It is helpful to think through the search keywords, the search objectives, the type of information and the source of the information beforehand. I listed in this post my most frequently used searching tools. I also added a table mapping some of the possible search tasks to the tool that I think is the best for accomplishing it. 

My top 9 search engines:

1. Google – what did you expect?
2. Del.icio.us – the social bookmarking web site
3. Twitter search (formerly Summize)- dipping into Twitter’s archives
4. Twingly – spam free information stored in blogs
5. Technorati – blogs, tags, rank
6. Delver – social graph and search engine
7. Xoost – social search engines
8. Stumpedia- social search engines
9. LinkedIn – yes, the networking tool

Mapping search tasks to proper search tool

I hope that by writing this post I can help people to become aware of their search activity and the available options today on the web. I will be happy to hear about more search tasks, objectives and tools.

Are we going to see a new alternative added to the growing list of online content search solutions (I wrote about some of them here)?

So what do we have so far? popularity search engine (Google), semantic search engine, location aware search engine, blog search engine, spam free blog search engine, social search engine, conversational search engine, visual search engine, passive search engine, social bookmarking search engine. Did I miss any?

The new alternative is a profile based search engine. I’m not talking about Google Web History solution for personalized search engine using historical searches for better qualifying search result. It is a great idea though. I’m talking about using information, about me, from my profile, to better fit results to my search query. For instance if I’m a programmer searching using the Hibernate keyword I don’t want to see results about bears. If I’m a doctor querying about Viagra I don’t want to get all the spam in the world from now till eternity. If I’m 20 years old my world is different than the life of anyone else (if you call it a life after 30:)). Now these examples are for static profile attribute, yet there are many dynamic qualifiers that can be used to improve search results. One example was implemented already in location-aware search engines using your where about. Another is using your network dynamics like what that Delver is trying to do.  

It was the Web 2.0 applications with Facebook, as one of its leading example, that helped us to realize that one’s profile is not just name, email and contact. Your network (friends and groups), media choices (pictures, movies, books, and games), and activities (feed, expending your network, and participation) is also part of who you are. So, why don’t use it to help us find relevant content?

last time i was browsing some blogs at BlogCatalog…i found a link that directs me to a social search engine website..

the name of this website is ximmy…

well, it is a social search engine site…it allows users to do reviews on any websites that they want to review…

what’s more interesting is, for every review that you make…it entitles you 10 points…if you can reach 1,000 points…which is the equivalent of 100 websites to be reivewed…you can earn $10…if you can reach 1,800 points…you can earn $20 dollars…so for just reviewing 280 websites you get to be paid $20..

but, decide immediately when you are really interested because this program is just a promo of ximmy…as soon as ximmy accumulates 200,000 site reviews…then they will stop the program…
so far they count every review as 10 points…so what are you waiting for..register now!!!!

just click on the images below if you want to register for ximmy

this is the points equivalent for joining ximmy…