SearchMe is an innovative search engine that provides visual ’stacks’ of search results. The idea is that you ‘flick’ through a stack of results, with each result taking the form a webpage preview. Now SearchMe has extended the metaphor to paid results with its launch of AdView.

AdView, currently in beta, involves paid preview pages displayed along with SearchMe’s organic search results.

AdView results will be interspersed among the organic results. Like the organic results, they will appear as specific webpage previews e.g. of a sales or conversion oriented landing page. Alternatively, advertisers can run a YouTube video which can be played without leaving SearchMe.

As TechCrunch points out, the SearchMe medium is likely to offer advertisers more scope to be creative than the typical ad units offered by Google, Yahoo or Microsoft Live. The only constraint on AdView taking off is SearchMe’s relatively small user base.

Over the past 6 months, SearchMe has grown to number about 3 million users in the U.S. but is still small when compared with the major search engines.

Source: Erick Schonfeld, “SearchMe Launches AdView Beta”, TechCrunch, February 24, 2009

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under Kikabink Lab, Online Advertising, Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.