fleeQ: and you shall find.

Online ad networks are a dime a dozen. But adUup founder Dylan Rosario — whose Seattle startup just closed a $500,000 seed financing deal — believes he has a new twist on the concept.

The idea is to add a new metasearch engine to the Web sites of small publishers and blogs, creating what Rosario calls “an alternative to the Google monopoly.” Beginning this week, adUup plans to have its new fleeQ search box installed on the Web sites of some of its 300 publishing partners.

A visitor to a Web site that has fleeQ enabled who decided to conduct a search would see results in a separate box that overlays a sponsor’s Web page. For example, a search for “sandals” or “high heels” could produce results from various properties — Amazon.com, Google, Yahoo or eBay. Those search results would “float” over the Web page of a publishing partner in the adUup network. In this case, that could be an online retailer that specialized in selling shoes.

AdUup handles the advertising around the search results, including video ads and a sponsored “skin” that wraps around the results. It also serves up the Web page of the publishing partner, which resides in the background. That technology is patent-pending, according to Rosario.

“The fleeQ product is for publishers to earn traffic and revenue from the searches that they are giving away to the big search engines for free,” says Rosario.

In the end, Rosario believes that he can offer small publishers a larger cut of the ad revenue by agreeing to install the search tool and participating in the ad network. He plans to pay out as much as 70 percent of the advertising revenue to larger publishers who sign up, which he believes is much higher than what Google or Yahoo offers. At the same time, Rosario said a publisher could choose to receive traffic rather than a split on the ad revenue.

adUup and fleeQ are certainly big ideas, with Rosario looking to swing for the fences. The company already employs 20 people, with plans to more than triple by early next year. To get there, he is looking to raise $15 million in a first round of funding, some of which would be used for an acquisition.

The 32-year-old entrepreneur says investors and advertisers have been receptive to the concept, noting that much of the ad inventory running through fleeQ has already been pre-sold. He’s also been meeting with the creators of social networking companies to see if they are interested in deploying the ad framework on behalf of their users.

The next phase for adUup is to integrate video ads into the search results, with Rosario saying they offer one of the first technologies to bring 30-second television spots online in a contextual way.

“The great thing is as you mouse over (the ad), you can watch the video and as you mouse away, it goes away. It is totally up to the consumer if they want to watch the video. It is not shoved down their throat,” he says.

Because of its focus on video ads, Rosario says he views Comcast as a bigger potential competitior than Google, even though the search giant has been experimenting with video ads as well.

Rosario has some experience in the online advertising arena, co-founding the pop-under advertising network ExitExchange.com in 1999. That company, which holds a patent on pop-under advertising technology, grew to more than 100,000 affiliate Web sites. He’s also worked as a senior architect at IBM.