Tuesday, May 4, 2010

LeapFish images search

This post is part of a blog series on "Why I like LeapFish". It is also an entry into the LeapFish $100,000 Cash Dash contest, which you can signup for here.

In this post, I'll discuss the LeapFish "Images" search feature. As I've mentioned before, LeapFish is not your standard search engine. It will provide many, many types of different content in addition to plain ole web results. It has a heavy focus on multimedia results, including image results.

You search specifically for just image results using http://images.leapfish.com. It's as simple as typing in your search term(s) and hitting enter or clicking the "search images" button next to the search box.

LeapFish will then display a listing of Image Results from Google and Yahoo. The top eight images on the page will be from Google, while the bottom eight come from Yahoo. In total, sixteen images are displayed on the page after performing an Images search on LeapFish. Image width and height are cataloged under each thumbnail, allowing the user to get a quick glance at the full size of each image.

But it doesn't stop there, LeapFish has a handy pagination feature that you can use to quickly flick through new pages of image results. To access this, simply click on the little arrow icons on the top right hand side of your image result thumbnails.

Another handy feature is the auto-zoom preview of larger versions of the thumbnails when you hover over each thumbnail in the image results. This allows you to get a better look at each image result without leaving the LeapFish Images search results page. 

If you click on an image, a shadow box appears to launch the slideshow feature. While in slideshow mode, you can simply click the image to advance to the next, full size displayed image, or hover over the image near the top right to click the next button. You can also hover over the top left to click the previous button.

And of course, if you want to go to the original website that posted the image, you can always click on the hyperlink that appears under the thumbnail of each image.

Overall, it's a pretty slick way to provide image search results and allow a user to easily navigate through the results set.

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LeapFish Search