San Francisco — Not everyone seems to know the art of making money from every corner of the computer display, but search titan Google is exceptional. The search company announced yesterday that it has extended its AdWords program to deliver text ads on the right side of the Google News search results pages in the U.S., just as Google has long done with normal Web search results. A move, that is intended at turning the news aggregation site into a money-making venture that may raise the hackles of newspapers and other media outlets.
A posting on a Google company blog by Josh Cohen, a business product manager at Google, announced the move, had this to say:
In recent months we have been carrying out test with a variety of different formats, like overlay ads on embedded videos from partners like the AP. We have always said that we would unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike, and we will continue to look at ways to deliver ads that are relevant for users and good for publishers, too, Cohen said, adding that the ads would only appear on Google News search-results pages in the United States.
However, not every search term will bring up ads. Searches for “Google” or “Yahoo” would not, but the company suggest that a search for “Microsoft” or “Adobe” or “Kindle” will all bring up sponsored text ads in the U.S.
“What this means is that when you enter a query like iPhone or Kindle into the Google News search box, you will see text ads alongside your News search results — similar to what you see on regular Google searches,” Cohen wrote.
A search for Kindle, Amazon’s electronic book reader, for example, returns links to news articles and a list of “sponsored links” such as Amazon’s Kindle page and ads for other readers such as Sony’s eBook device.
Google News gathers headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources around the world and provides links to articles on their websites. The articles are picked up, according to Google, “by computers that evaluate, among other things, how often and on what sites a story appears online.”
The introduction of ads to Google News search is intended to be tailored to the news search terms, but the two are not always on the same page, so to speak, is the latest effort by the Mountain View, California-based company to monetize its various Web ventures.
John Battle, a media analyst and the founder of Wired magazine, wrote on his blog, battellemedia.com, that the introduction of ads to Google News search was likely to prove controversial.
He remarked that the Google announcement did not mention “sharing revenues with the news (organizations) who provide Google News its content.”
“I suppose that Google gets paid per click for action on those ad offerings,” said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based non-profit journalism school.
“But I doubt that they have any particular plans to share that with the people whose news they’re aggregating.”
Agence France-Presse and Google signed a licensing agreement in April 2007 giving the search engine the right to post AFP news and photos on Google News.
The agreement was the outcome of a lawsuit filed by AFP against Google in March 2005 accusing it of copyright infringement for allegedly posting AFP headlines, news summaries and photographs without permission.
Google generates most of its income from Internet search advertising but, in the wake of a much tougher economy around the globe, it has gradually been introducing advertising to other properties during the past year, such as YouTube, Google Maps and Google Finance.