Interesting concept, though I've never been a big fan of the Pinterest gallery layout. It doesn't follow the natural way that people read, which makes it take much longer to scan a page and understand what is on it.
@therpgfanatic Agreed, I find the pinterest lay out hard to follow.
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@therpgfanatic Thanks for the feedback! Our searches return in a left>right, top>bottom format, so while it is different than a typical search engine would give you (top > bottom), it does follow the natural flow of reading. Thanks for checkin' us out. #HappySearching
@connor What happens is the boxes do not line up identically, requiring constant mouse movement to adjust to read an entire block or see the other half of an image. This leads to half a box of text being off-screen at times. Basically it turns what should be a very leisurely activity -- reading -- into a very proactive experience.
English readers are trained to scan a document from left to right and then down a line, rinse and repeat. But the "gallery photo" format, while working for large images, breaks down when you start putting several sentences of text into these blocks. What happens is the reader has to scan the boxes and then scan over into the other boxes. It's not exactly the same as a newspaper or magazine, as those layouts are not image intense for side-columns the way Pinterest's gallery format works.
Another point to consider is the size of a magazine or a newspaper is much larger than the typical screen size of a laptop. This is another reason why the "gallery" layout isn't very good for text. The Pinterest layout is essentially a photobook at less than half the size of what they usually are -- remember these books typically fill up an entire coffee table.
Basically what happens is I find myself overwhelmed with large images and text that is compacted into several infoblocks, and I have to jump from block to block to read. This is probably why Pinterest works so well for fashion items; the text is meaningless to the viewer, the product itself speaks volumes to the reader. But when it comes to a search engine that is indexing web pages that are text heavy, that's not working so well for me. The image it grabs may actually be totally meaningless to the website.
@ShaanVP This is a fair question. I'd love to hear @bfeld's thoughts on this. Brad, what's a realistic outcome that you're hoping for with an investment like this? That Leap.it will capture some percentage of Google users? That it will get acquired by a big player like Google?
USV also made a search engine investment in recent years with DuckDuckGo.
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