Blog reviews are much more efficient and effective for product/service promotion because influential bloggers have a huge user base and users trust the bloggers opinion for the most part. If such bloggers endorse a product/service, chances of users acting upon bloggers recommendation are more when compared to promoting through a flashy banner or a text based ad.

Anyway, getting back to the point. "To Do" List for Product/Service Companies before they Approach a Blogger for a review or promotion.

1) Write your own review and send it to the bloggers, let them read and understand your product or service even before they use it..
2) Send your product to the blogger.

• If its a paid software then do send a registered, fully functional software. It wont hurt
• if its a paid service ask the blogger for an ID for free registration with full access.
• If its a product, send it at the time of requesting a review

3) Mention a list of features and topics you want the blogger to cover in the review
4) Mention the target audience for a better (may be) more personalized writeup.
5) Do include a fact-list of the product
6) Offer free downloads,  exclusive beta invitations or something which gives a sense of differentiator to the blog readers

These are few things I could think of. Do leave comments if you see something missing on the list. Especially bloggers, if you see something missing, I’ll be happy to update the list.

I used SearchMe for a while, I wont beat around the bushes, I didn’t like the service much. I still did not understand the purpose of the new Search Engine. The way I look at it, it clearly does not address any issue in the search arena.

My Observations and Suggestions:
Lets start with positives…

• I love the categorization of the results
• The UI looks nice and clean
• Offers both Image and text results

Improvements and Suggestions:

• Image rendering is slower when compared with the text based search engines
• It would be better if users are able to read the text on the snapshots otherwise what’s the purpose of the snapshots?
• SPAM is one of the biggest issues hitting all the major search engines. I noticed 3 spam sites in the first 10 results.
• SearchMe should offer full text search mode as well

Personally, I wont use SearchMe as much as I use Google or any other search engine I use.