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AFTER colonizing cyberspace, Google is going into the newspaper business.

The search engine giant is in talks with several newspaper publishers to sell space in their pages to its online clients.

This expansion will worry bosses of rival media companies who have already called for greater regulation of the fast-growing Google.

Google Print Ads is an extension of Google AdWords, the auction system that lets companies bid for a slot that appears alongside specific online word searches.

Instead of an auction, advertisers pick a newspaper online through Google and enter a bid for available advertising space on a given page and day.

But rather than offering to pay the list price, customers say what they are prepared to pay. Publishers can choose to accept or decline the offer.

Google takes a slice of the advertising revenue from every deal struck. It even offers to design the ad if the advertiser does not have the capability to do it alone. “We believe that online and offline are part of the same melting pot,” Google said. “It is not an ‘either or’.”

Google’s British advertising revenues rose roughly 40 per cent to about pound stg. 1.25 billion ($2.8 billion) this year, overtaking the publisher Trinity Mirror’s income, which includes newspaper sales on top of advertising.

Print Ads, which started in the US mid-year, already supplies 600 titles, ranging from the 3000-sales-a-day Shelby ville Daily Union in Illinois to the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina, which sells 215,000.

A British newspaper boss said: “It is an interesting development with the prospect of bringing new advertisers into our newspapers. If advertisers find it to be an effective channel, then there is the prospect to form direct relationships on a more normal basis.”