A post by David Warlich encouraged my exploration of Leapfish – another attempt to improve the search experience. As I understand the intent of Leapfish from the “About us” page and the Warlich post, it appears that Leapfish is an attempt to do a better job of integrating the multiple dimensions (webs, blogs, video, images, news) from which we potentially might acquire information.
I like to evaluate such services using my “question of the day”. Today’s question happens to be “If the inauguration set such an optimistic tone, why did the stock market take such a drastic downturn?” I really want to know.
I tried – inauguration AND stock market – I could find no guidelines regarding boolean search techniques, but this phrase seemed to work.
The Google search seemed to reveal that others had similar questions (the second hit linked to CNBC).
The top link from the News panel offered a comment from MarketWatch . There was some reassuring data from this source –
Consider that, of the 27 inaugurations that have occurred since the Dow was created in 1896, this index has declined on 19 of those days, or 70% of the time.
This was at least reassuring.
BTW – the MarketWatch link did appear a little further down on the list of sources provided by Google so perhaps this cannot be regarded as an additional find.
One of the top listed blogs (an offering from Tim Paradis of the Associated Press so also kind of a news source) seemed to at least offer an explanation noting recent news regarding further struggles in the banking industry.
One of the most interesting resources was a YouTube video which if I understand the language seems to predict a bounce. WRONG, but interesting. It is reassuring to note that my naive assumptions were expressed in more complex language by folks who get paid for this sort of analysis and we were both wrong.
So LeapFish did expand my personal experience. I tend not to look for explanations on YouTube and probably trust Google too much.
The message – perhaps we all fall into a rut. A tool like Leapfish makes options more visible and perhaps encourages a little more explanation.
