• by May 5, 2008

Yureekah, described as the first search engine for "real time competitive analysis of online advertising," launched in alpha mode this week.

Developed by 30Seven Holdings, whose other ventures include media planning/buying agency iThink Labs and creative services agency 30Seven Design, Yureekah's search results show a brand's current display ads and where they are running. Users can also search by category of product or service.

"We realized the inefficiencies and the manual processes involved with online competitive research," said Vishal Sharma, Yureekah's co-founder, who is based in India.

Devaraj Southworth, Yureekah's New York-based co-founder, said that iThink's own media planning experience was a large impetus for developing Yureekah. "This will decrease the amount of time it takes to really develop plans," he said.

Currently, agencies don't get to work with real-time competitive data. Yureekah's results, on the other hand, provide "live data vs. data that may be old" and it's data that can be archived into an ongoing repository.

Yureekah also lets users see differences between ads running in different environments. For example, "an ad running on Yahoo in the U.S. is not the same as one running on Yahoo in India," Southworth said.

The search engine's alpha version covers the U.S., UK, India and the United Arab Emirates, allowing searches to be limited to one country or worldwide. Yureekah currently finds only display ads, whether jpeg, flash or animation, but Southworth promised to add other ad types like video and text in the future. The intention is "to replicate the success of Google's AdWords in the display space," Southworth said, noting that "Google does text ads extremely well."

Now that the product is up and running, the company is seeking equity financing. Other plans call for revenue-generating pay modules--which Southworth wouldn't elaborate on, except to promise "a full suite of products that take you through the entire media plan...into the tracking."

Southworth acknowledged that in the early going, some of the search queries haven't been pulling adequate results, but promised improved results in a couple of months or sooner, as more data is collected.