Gravee, a new meta search engine — that gives money back

Gravee is a new search engine that hopes to rise out of the pack by sharing ad revenue with content owners and publishers for being included in its index.

The idea, presumably, is that more publishers would be willing to provide Gravee with free access to their content, and this would drive users to Gravee because of its superior offerings.

Right now, Gravee relies on the search results provided by popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

We just tried a random search on Gravee, using the term “Kleiner Perkins,” a venture capital firm. We found our site, SiliconBeat, listed twice high up in the results. Will that be enough to drive us to register with the site, to collect our revenue, as the site allows…

us to do?

Let’s see. Here is the formula: With Gravee’s AdShare program, when a user clicks an ad on Gravee, “up to 70%” of the ad revenue generated as a result is divided between the 10 sites included in the natural search results on the page (i.e. 70%/10 = 7% of ad revenue to each Web site on the page – for every ad that is clicked).

Because we own two of the sites in the results, we’d get “up to 14 percent” of the ad revenue. Not bad. If the site has any traction at all, we’d eventually amble over and sign up.

Gravee also shares up to 35% of revenue with publishers who join Gravee’s “affiliate program” and place Gravee’s search box on their site.

An interesting model, but it will have to beg new publishers to provide information on their site that can’t be had anywhere else, otherwise no one will come, right?

Here’s part of the note we got from Gravee on Monday:

As you know, the blogosphere has been abuzz on how search engines and other web2.0 start ups are taking advantage of content creators and contributors without compensating them. We couldn’t agree more! And that’s why we created Gravee.