Google has introduced ads to the results of search queries on Google News in a move aimed at turning the news aggregation site into a money-making venture that may raise the hackles of newspapers and other media outlets.
Josh Cohen, a business project manager at Google, announced the change in a post on the official Google News blog on Wednesday.
“What this means is that when you enter a query like iPhone or Kindle into the Google News search box, you’ll 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.
“In recent months we’ve been experimenting with a variety of different formats,” Cohen said. “We’ve always said that we’d unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike.”
“We’ll 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.
Google News aggregates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources around the world and provides links to articles on their websites.
The articles are selected, 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 the latest attempt by the Mountain View, California-based company to monetize its various Web ventures.
