I recently had a request from a client to evaluate advertising on a new search engine. My first instinct was ‘absolutely not.’ Why would you advertise somewhere new when Google has about 60% of daily searches, with Yahoo and MSN pulling in the next 30%? But I looked into the company called Leapfish for them and discovered some very interesting things.

First, they themselves are not actually a search engine. They simply use Google, Yahoo, and MSN for their searches but try to provide more than just that. Their search feature is unique in that it actively updates the results as you type. So if you type in “a” the results for “a” show up. Then if you continue on and search for “aardvark,” the search results update as you type. Although you would really nave to be a fairly slow typer for the results to update after every letter, it is still a cool concept.

They have also integrated news, video, images, shopping, and answers into the search feature. Where you would normally see the Google ads, the top results for each of these categories is displayed. By clicking on ’shopping’ the most relevant Amazon.com and Ebay aardvark results show up. Similarly, news is provided by the Yahoo news feed and videos are provided by YouTube. The videos also begin playing by simply mousing over them, so you don’t even need to navigate away from the page.

The most interesting feature to my client was their advertising model. Where Google and Yahoo charge on a per-click basis, anywhere from 10 cents to $3.50, the Leapfish model is more based on the idea of purchasing a space. A company chooses a keyword, then purchases one of the three ad locations. Their ad will always appear in this location for that search term, as long as they pay the yearly fee, with no further fees no matter how many clicks the ad receives. They can choose to sell the space to someone else, or lease it to another company while retaining ownership, but as long as they own it, their ad cannot be bumped by a company with a higher advertising budget.

This advertising model very unique although the effectiveness of the ad is still dependent on the number of people using the search engine. So will people leave Google in favor of Leapfish? The keywords are not cheap, but if people make the switch it could be a very effective advertising venue.