Last April, the alpha version of the India-based Yureekah (www.yureekah.com), the first known search engine for use by individuals seeking online advertising information (and effectively organizing and making it universally accessible for free), was launched for testing. Yureekah allows its users to find out where competitors are advertising and determining the best options for future brand advertising is as easy as clicking a mouse button.

“We set out with a singular mission; to organize the world’s online advertising information and make it universally accessible and useful through a single, automated portal – and in the process eliminate the enormous inefficiencies that currently exist,” said Yureekah Co-Founder Devaraj Southworth. “Yureekah is free to all users, enabling agencies and advertisers to reduce costs, but also levels the playing field for small business owners and individual advertisers by offering the same access and ability. We believe that our suite of products will change the way in which traditional online advertising operates. Our objective is to develop a collaborative online platform for all online advertising needs and intend to replicate the success of Google’s AdWord in the Display space.”

Yureekah can prove to be a great resource for various categories of professionals. Here is some information from their press release:

*AGENCIES – With Yureekah, conducting a real-time competitive analysis of similar businesses takes minutes versus weeks. Not only does Yureekah search competitor ads internationally, but it also archives them for future use. Yureekah also enables live, automated searching for global campaigns, making the task painless.

*ADVERTISERS – Launching a product worldwide in less than 24 hours used to be impossible – but not anymore. Yureekah enables competitive research and understanding of competitors’ brands online advertising capabilities in no time.

*SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS – Finding out where the top brands in a field are advertising online is a daunting task, especially for small business owners short on time and money. With Yureekah, small business owners have access to the same easy-to-use competitive search tool as the large advertisers, all for free.

“The technology solution Yureekah has developed is one of a kind, and is poised to become a major force in the online media industry,” said Larry Bouts, Yureekah advisor and former PepsiCo operating division CFO, Chairman of Six Flags and President of Toys “R” Us International. “It is clear that Yureekah sits in the middle of a $50 billion industry that is growing at 30 plus percent a year.”

The inspiration for Yureekah came from serial entrepreneurs, Devaraj Southworth and Vishal Sharma. “As an agency ourselves, we realized the inefficiencies and the manual processes involved with online competitive research,” said Yureekah Co-Founder Vishal Sharma. “In several situations we had to turn away business because timelines were unrealistic for us, let alone larger agencies. We realized that if we, as a boutique agency, were facing these issues, then certainly other professionals were feeling the same pains.”

To date, Yureekah has been completely self-funded by Southworth and Sharma, but the decision has been made to seek equity financing, including a major capital campaign launch.