Marxque Inc.

Leapfish is a type of metasearch site known as a search aggregator.Search aggregators compile and list the results taken from other search engines, in addition to providing their own content (generally in the form of advertising or result positioning based on internal algorithms.

In the case of LeapFish, the top results of any given search can be advertisements, where an individual or company can pay a registration fee to LeapFish to be positioned at the top of the result list in response to certain keyword searches.

Controversy

The new Leapfish has had a mixed reception from users of sitepoint forums, from bloggers and other regular web users.

On February 3rd, 2009 the online blog TechCrunch posted evidence of LeapFish sales representatives intentionally abusing the Google's pay-per-click model against potential customers. The CEO of LeapFish's parent company, DotNext, confirmed the sales representative's actions, but announced that the representative was no longer employed by the company.

The company has also been accused of astroturfing(Note, in particular, the comment from Robin Wauters on November 20th, 2008 at 12:57 pm PST), and spamming.

As opposed to other Search Engines, such as Google or Yahoo which appear to favour web based sales, Leapfish keywords are largely sold via aggressive telemarketing[11] operation which has not been without friction with the online community. The telemarketing team consists of 80 sales persons.