What happens when you make paid search ads both relevant and visual? Searchme, the search engine startup which presents results as a stack of full-page previews that you can flip through, is hoping to find out with the beta launch of AdView. Its first foray into advertising, AdView is SearchMe’s version of AdWords, except that instead of selling of paid text links it will be interspersing into its results clickable previews of entire Webpages, videos, or other visual advertising.
If you are an advertiser and want to try it out, SearchMe is giving a free trial to the first 500 companies or individuals that sign up here. That’s right, you get to run a free ad campaign on SearchMe for 30 days.
To see how this works, search for “Ralph Lauren” and if you flip through to the third result, it will be an ad that shows a landing page for its fall collection. In other words, the Website becomes the ad itself. This approach is similar to what StumbleUpon does, with ads placed in every 20 or so Stumbles. But the ad unit can also be a YouTube video which can be played without leaving SearchMe. For instance, check out the third result when you search for “Mac” (SearchMe inserted one of the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads for demonstration purposes).
This could potentially be a very effective form of advertising. It is almost like a magazine ad where the ad is a Website. Advertisers who create visually appealing landing pages I suspect will do better. And it is also a potentially powerful way to target video ads, combining keyword targeting with a TV-like viewing experience. (Check out SearchMe’s own video commercial embedded below, which it plans to run as a TV spot)
SearchMe is not huge by any means, but it provides a nice sandbox to experiment with new types of advertising. Quantcast shows some decent growth over the past six months to about 3 million visitors in the U.S. That is certainly large enough to test the ROI for visual paid search. And its organic growth suggests that the idea could catch on. Certainly, it doesn’t hurt that Apple is training consumers to become comfortbale with the page-flipping metaphor. One of the key features of its just-released version of the Safari browser is a similar Coverflow-like treatment of bookmarked pages and browsing history.
I am not sure how a service like this would play in India however where broadband is not as prevalent.
That said, I will sign up to try out the service. There seems to be more and more welcome innovations in the search space recently.
This is certainly the case in India.
Anjali Sen
Hi Anjali,
I really like your blog, and your most recent post on the new Yauba search engine from India. I got a guest password to Yauba from one of the commentators to your blog.
I agree with you, it rocks! Yauba’s alpha is better than Searchme + Cuil + Powerset’s beta.
Jonathan
Thanks Jonathan for your kind comments.
Yes, there is quite a lot of new innovation going on in India. I wrote a long post about it in my blog http://smartbab...-valley_22.html, but the gist of it is that this global economic recession is actually creating more entrepreneurs and innovation in India, not less.
Yauba is just one example of this trend that I am seeing here in India. I am still playing around with the Yauba search myself, but it is very nicely designed for sure. I’ll post a full review after I’ve explored it further.
Anjali Sen
Anyone who has worked with resources out of India quickly learns that their culture is one of obedience and class and not creative thinking. From testers to designers and developers, way too much structure and hand-holding is required. The only way that will ever change is if enough Indians return to India after getting “Americanized”, but at that point who in their right mind would move back to India?
wow. awesome social engineering!
Visual search page review is for porno. Just like Delicious and other services that folks thought had growing adoption but turned out they could not monetize due to the content people were accessing.
SearchMe is a $100MM flop. Please. The valuation they commanded is a joke in itself.
People like to scan lots of information and search / determine themselves — exactly why Google is as thin as it is.
Visual Search page by page is not efficient and not very well received.
$100 million Flop for Sequoia.
Take that to the…well…shower? Not the bank.
Yeah – and the quantcast stuff is all fake. I know the internal numbers for searchme, and they are at 75k searches per day. Please – that is not a search engine. They are another $100M search flop.
BTW, they copied the Ads from Cooliris which was the first company to come up with this kind of Ads, and they do a phenomenal job with it.
too bad they dont have a strategic business to business social network agenda. they need to be more sticky. i like their product and it has potential they just dont have a great domain and social network clue. they appear to need more “talent”.
InnovationLocator.com – dig in
Fantastic Department Store ad!
When I use Google many times I have to click through to see if this is the result that I want… So in a way searchme saves that time.
There are 2 problems as I see them:
1. Their ads and display is fine. But their search sucks. I looked for domain names and the search threw up results which were buried in some linkedIN pages.
2. What prevents google from doing this sort of thing? I mean how much ‘technology’ is there in this? Is this IP protected?
Actually I thats a pretty cool idea, a total rip off of Mac’s computer search app (which I find tremendously useful).
they arent the first to do this, RedZee.com has been doing this for a while…might want to change the title from “Paid Search Just Got Visual” to something along the line of “Another Visual Search Engine Adds Advertisements”.
There is no way for an average joe to see the difference between an ad and the other organic results
Is this a solution in search of a problem?
I Check.I apply and Submit.So far I wait and will see what will going on.For me Searchme,is just perfect to looking for Something beyond a words.though,I believe in most country ,the service is “slow to load ,and from that I am worry that looks will degrade my ‘Online money spending,in my advertising budget
Only for U.S.
I don’t it brings more goodie than the rest of the paid ads or paid survey,
try here which it has best review on the product
http://minzhiboutique.com/
http://minzhibo...m/SearchEngine/ or here http://minzhibo...tGoogleAdsFree/
Rgds and good luck
I just signed up. Hopefully with no hidden commitments…
Being able to see, visually, your ad landing page is cool, although the search results still need to be made a lot more accurate, at the moment they simply do not compare, in terms of relevancy, to Google or Yahoo, which is a shame because the searchme platform is great. I love how interactive it is, this is how search should become. Hopefully the accuracy will take hold with time. I’ve downloaded the searchme widget for my blog and written a thumbs-ups post for it http://www.3ac....dget-super-cool get involved!
another hype job from techcrunch…
Checked out searchme. Makes finding things kinda slow. I found bevyfind.com, which lets you both see all results from a Google Search, and let’s you open the actual website link right on the search page. Makes finding what you’re looking for REALLY quick.