• by Ross Fadner , September 2, 2004

Four months ago, a video and rich media technology provider named Viewpoint quietly launched a search engine toolbar with a unique twist that has begun performing very well for advertisers.

Powered by Yahoo! search technology, the Search Toolbar leverages Viewpoint's existing visual technology to create a toolbar that displays results with a visual representation that is unlike other toolbars.

Once users perform a search, at the top of the browser window, just above the results page, a series of thumbnail images are displayed that show the landing pages of each of the search results. Eight or so visual results are displayed at the top of the page, and users scroll across to view the rest of the search results appearing in thumbnail format.

As users mouse over the icons, they zoom in and out in the same fashion as the Mac OS X. The search results are also displayed in the normal text style directly below the visual results.

Because the thumbnails contain the actual landing pages of each search result, users can tell immediately if the site they are mousing over is a content-rich site or just a keyword spammed site filled with hundreds of links or ads. However, the generation of thumbnails is done in real time, so the process can be quite painful on a normal dial up connection. Because of this, Viewpoint allows users to disable the thumbnail display and use the toolbar as a regular search toolbar.

From an advertising standpoint, sponsored links on Viewpoint's Search Toolbar have a distinct advantage over other search engines. Viewpoint displays its visual results in a linear fashion, beginning with sponsored results first. So the first half a dozen or so thumbnail pages are advertisers' paid results.

The only characteristic that distinguishes paid from natural results is a gray border that outlines all paid results. Natural results follow in a white outline. The only way the end-user knows this is if he or she read the end-user licensing agreement, which is a "notification" method that is often controversially deployed by ad-supported software companies. It's controversial precisely because most users don't carefully read licensing agreements.

Nevertheless, advertisers, Viewpoint, and Yahoo! all benefit from the practice. According to Viewpoint CEO Jay Amato, Viewpoint's paid listings have a higher click-through rate than the rest of the industry, but he declined to go into specifics. According to Amato, Viewpoint splits paid search profits with Yahoo! subsidiary Overture Services (which powers Yahoo!'s paid search technology) 50-50. Amato said the company made no agreement with Yahoo! about the practice of paid inclusion. However, he noted that Viewpoint's search results are marginally different from those of its search provider.

Other features of the Search Toolbar include the ability to perform comparative searches with Yahoo! results appearing in icon form at the top and the other search engine's search results on the bottom, and the ability to save results as favorites that appear in the bookmarks section as clickable thumbnails. According to Amato, the Search Toolbar will soon allow users to choose skins to decorate their toolbars, which will result in branding and rich media opportunities for advertisers.

In addition to search services, Viewpoint also provides online media technology, which it licenses to several publishers including America Online, rich media ad-serving, and creative services for agencies and advertisers.