About six months ago, I wrote about Augmented Search, a new way of enhancing search results. It was developed by Xmarks, a San Francisco-based company that started life as Foxmarks, a Firefox plugin that backed up browser bookmarks on its servers and allowed consumers to sync browsers on different machines. (You can read how Augmented Search works here.)

Based on that concept, Xmarks is launching a new product called SearchBoost. “As I hinted earlier, this is our business model,” said James Joaquin, the chief executive officer of Xmarks. “The paid service overlays ratings and reviews onto their pay-per-click (PPC) ads across the 450 million searches performed by Xmarks users each month.” The company currently has 4.5 million active add-on users and has a billion bookmarks in its database. Joaquin says that the company ran “an extensive 30-day test across 200K users and found that, on average, SearchBoost increases PPC click-through rates by 15 percent.”

Well now all they have to do is find customers and convince them to pay for this service.