That is what Kansas City, Mo.-based startup Leap2 hopes its new search site that combines the web, location and social in a way that delivers detailed results while allowing for serendipitous discovery, will be: Disruptive in a way that draws search market share from Google. The startup launches its site Tuesday on mobiles and also said today it had raised $1.6 million in first round funding. The round was led by Dundee Venture Capital, with support from OpenAir Equity, Linseed Capital and the Wichita Technology Corporation.

Mike Farmer, the CEO of Leap2, is no stranger to search, having tried seven years ago with a web site called Kozoru. But this time he thinks that focusing on mobile, as well as bringing in social elements to a search gives end users better results as well as a few nice surprises.

The Leap2 web plus social results page.

For example, when the app opens, you see a home screen that offers the day’s news as a slate of pictures. Some are self-evident and others are perhaps a mystery. Clicking on a picture offers you one of the day’s top news stories. Once you enter a search term, the screens splits in half with the top half showing Twitter results related to the search and the bottom half showing images of the web sites that match your search.

Here’s where it gets dicey. Searches for “the best brunch in Austin” or “tacos and tequila Austin” (it’s a restaurant) worked well. I saw relevant websites, pictures of places, and even tweets from people who were there and a tweet promising me a discount next weekend at a brunch locale. But when I searched for my name and other people’s names, I started running into what is the bane of the mobile web — requests to download apps.

My people searches drew up magazine and LinkedIn results that I couldn’t see without clicking through to the “no thanks” button on the screen that pops up asking me to download a mobile app. I, like the rest of the population, hate those screens. Farmer is hoping that the mobile web becomes less about apps and more about the web soon, but I’m not holding my breath.

Location results page.

Things like the discovery of discounts or even insights from Twitter, (Farmer wants to integrate FourSquare, Yelp and Facebook eventually for the social aspects) plus the integrated location and directions, help make this a contender against Google Now, which I adore for its ability to read my calendar and tell me when to leave the house to make a meeting. Leap2 can’t offer that, and it’s going to face the same challenge that all search engines face, which is enticing users to click on it as opposed to going with the already-integrated search functions.

As for monetization, Farmer said that some time in the future Leap2 will integrate sponsored search results, initially among the social cards on the top half of the screen. The goal will be to play relevant results based on the location, the search or other information gleaned. Farmer gave the example of real-time deals. He plans to have the same image-filled-card-like interface that spans the app now, be the same interface for showing sponsored search ads as well.

The mobile app for iOS and Android launches Tuesday, with the website launching on Wednesday. Give it a try. I thought it was worth using, especially when I’m on the go, as it gives a much richer picture on the small screen than I might otherwise get.

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The team behind Leap2, which is based in Kansas City, Kan., set out to create a mobile search app tailored to smartphone use: touch-oriented, one-handed, and fit to a small screen. In other words, the opposite of Google’s desktop search standard. In my original look at the app, I talked about how it was successful, as well as areas that it needed to work on, especially speed and the overall look.

The update addressed some of that, though the app’s speed still isn’t as snappy as I’d like. However, the new navigation and simplification, on the whole, are positive changes. I rather liked the scrolling wheel in the previous design, but the volume of choices it offered could be a bit unwieldy. With the new look, the results of your search appear under tabs in the lower half of the screen — images, local, web, a sharing tab for Twitter, Facebook and email, and social buzz results. Tapping (instead of scrolling down from the top of the screen) gives you a fullscreen view of any of your results, and an icon in the lower right takes you back to your results when you’re done.

The social part is the major project the Leap2 team has been working on. They’re repositioning it as a place to search for things in the present, but also as a tool for extending that search out into the future for topics you want to stay on top of across the entire web. You can use Leap2 to create a hashtag and anywhere that tag appears on a social network or somewhere on the web, it’ll show up in a specific tab in the app.

It’s like a news alert or a Twitter hashtag search, but put into context and brought up to real-time speed for the whole web, Michael Farmer, CEO of Leap2, explained to me:

If I’m searching for a Canon D500 camera and I want to buy it in the next week, I can create a sepcific query and receive price deals. For the first time we’re taking the element in time and moving it foward with real time for the broad web, and not just news alerts. It’s taking any slice of information and moving it forward.

Just because someone is searching for a topic now, it doesn’t mean their interest ends once they find an answer. In the image above I searched for an upcoming festival. There aren’t any results yet, but there will be this weekend when it’s taking place. Leap2 can keep multiple hashtag searches going at the same time. I can have “baseball trade” and “Philadelphia restaurant opening” going simultaneously since those are topics I’m always going to want to be updated on. And it won’t just be a list of links; Leap2 delivers results based on the currency of the information, links that are being shared often and things that people are talking about — for example, things that have been retweeted.

Adding context and making search results relevant to what people are talking about is great. My issue is still the overall look and feel of the app — it needs to be smoother and it needs a more polished look. But it’s still a decent idea. And we can always use apps rethinking how we’re using our mobile devices, especially for a category like search or discovery, which continue to be major challenges as we deal with the overflow of information that the web brings.

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A small Midwestern startup is rethinking the way we use web search on our phones by tweaking the now-standard Google layout. Their solution is a mobile app called Leap2 Navigator, which is available now in the iOS App Store. It’s initially for the iPhone only, though the company plans to make the jump to Google’s own Android very soon. It’s an admirable — though still incomplete — solution to what can be a somewhat annoying aspect of smartphone use.

Make no mistake, Leap2 isn’t rethinking the search algorithm itself, just the way results are presented and contextualized. Google is the undisputed king of search, regardless of platform, owning roughly two-thirds of the total web search market. It’s in position to dominate mobile search as well, with Android on millions of phones, Google search apps for other mobile OSes, and of course Google is accessible via any mobile browser.

But the problem, according to the guys at Leap2, is that it’s the same desktop browser search experience, just shrunk down to a smaller screen.

There have been some other creative end runs around using Google to search on a mobile device lately, with things like Apple’s Siri, the voice control assistant on the iPhone 4S, which lets users speak questions you might typically Google, but instead Siri does the search and answers instantaneously.

Leap2 isn’t that drastic. It’s built on Microsoft’s Bing’s API, but the top results (in my experience) have never been from Bing. Its aim is to make a search app that works best on a smartphone screen because it was made for a smartphone screen.

“Google’s results [page] is 9,000 results and in descending order,” Leap 2 co-founder and CEO Michael Farmer pointed out in an interview. They have the data there, but it’s not as useful if you don’t happen to be scrolling with a mouse and or scroll buttons on a browser window.

Instead, Leap2 works with a simple but creative layout: the top half of the screen uses two slot-machine-like scrolling reels, the bottom half displays your results. The large one on the left is your search field you type into, and above and below your search you can scroll to suggested related search terms that pop up based on the keywords you provided. On the right, a smaller scrolling reel has icons you can choose to better target your search to a specific category, like news, social sites, images, general phonebook info (like business names, numbers and addresses), location/maps and shopping.

When you type in your search, instead of a results list of links a la typical desktop search, you get three tabs of websites that open up on the bottom half of the screen. The middle tab is what Leap2 thinks you’re looking for, the No. 1 result. The left tab is the No. 2 result, and the right tab the No. 3 result.

This layout is meant to be the quickest and easiest way to interact with your results, and it’s tailored to those who might navigate or search with with just a thumb or a few fingers.

“The biggest thing driving our navigation, it creates a sideways T,” explained Farmer. “If you hold your phone with your right hand, you can navigate easy across the center and with your right hand you navigate up and down [...] Leap 2 focuses on a six -square-inch display, and where your thumb is. That six-inch square is always in your field of view.”

The reason your No. 1 result is in that center tab is because the middle of the phone is easiest to reach with your thumb. And the idea of displaying the web page instead of just a link is so you can see if it’s a site you trust or not immediately.

Taking the leap

I really like the idea of Leap2, and while the app works, it’s a bit rough around the edges. Here’s what I found:

• It anticipates what you want correctly much of the time. I searched for Hotel Monteleon in New Orleans and the first three windows it opened, in order, were the hotel’s website, the TripAdvisor page for it, and its Wikipedia page. In this case, Leap2 guessed correctly. I wanted to see the hotel’s site.
• It surfaces the content in smart, accessible ways. By spinning the righthand dial down to the icon that looks like a phone book it gave me the Bing, Yelp and Foursquare listing pages for the hotel. The Bing page gives me exactly what I wanted: the address and phone number.
• Sliding down to the thought bubble/chat icon button, I could see the “buzz” on the hotel: if anyone’s talking about it on Twitter, or checking in on Foursquare or Brightkite. Sliding up to the picture icon, I got image search results from Bing, Flickr and Picasa (probably not quite the right order for me, but close).
• Scrolling all the way to the bottom of the right dial to the “+” acronym brings up the option to share your search results via email, Twitter or Facebook. The process goes smoothest if you’ve authorized Leap2 to access your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

As I mentioned, the app is not perfect. It can be amazingly on target for some things, while inconsistent on others.

• A search for “bars near Lafayette Square New Orleans” brought back some odd results. The first page suggested was Hotels.com, then HotelPlanner.com, then NileGuide, which was actually results for Jackson Square, not Lafayette. In this case, I clearly was looking for Yelp or TripAdvisor recommendations, which Leap2 didn’t connect.
• When you click on one of the website results, it automatically fills your whole screen. To go back to the default view, you use a simple downward swiping motion. Unfortunately, where you swipe is very close to the new pull-down shade notifications menu in iOS 5. So occasionally I would mistakenly bring up that menu instead of returning to the default search view of the app.
• Google Maps renders slowly. In fact, several features would be much better if they were sped up.

Overall, this app needs its speed turbocharged, and the design could use some polish — it’s a little rough compared to really well-designed apps. But I like where they’re going with it and I think there’s a great idea here.

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