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Google plans to begin selling advertising space for more than 50 newspapers in a three-month test starting later this month, the company said Monday.

The Mountain View, California, search king has signed deals with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as the Tribune, Gannett, and Hearst newspaper chains to try out the online auction, which will allow businesses to bid for news ad space.

“It’s early to say, but I think if I would bet on a company that would do a good job, then Google would be the one,” Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Sasa Zorovic said.

Google’s move represents a turnabout for the online advertising giant, which has gained about a 25 percent share of the web-based ad market, often at the expense of newspapers and their web sites and print products. Now Google will be enlisted in the effort to sell print ads in the declining newspaper market and may help keep some of the papers afloat.

“Advertisers come to them and they give budgets to Google to put them online, so if Google said you’re already giving us your budget, why not give us the budget to put you somewhere else that's relevant other than the Internet?” Mr. Zorovic said. “It makes life simpler by extending them to other channels than online, if they want to advertise in other places as well.”

But Google has been making moves to embrace the print medium. In September, the company said it would put the news archives of many newspaper companies online, including The Washington Post Company, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters, going back up to 300 years (see Google Finds Life in News Morgue).

Last September, Google also began brokering print ads for technology magazines such as PC Magazine and Maximum PC (see TechSpin: Google Gets Glossy). Google has also been expanding into other fields of advertising, such as radio and TV (see Google Gets into Radio Ads).

The move will allow companies that buy ads online via Google, such as eBags.com, which is participating in the trial, to also purchase newsprint ads. While the search king has experienced mixed success so far with its print ad-brokering efforts, it has decided to give the newspaper publishers increased control over the sales. Google will share ad revenue with the news publishers.

“How successful they will be is another story,” said Mr. Zorovic. “But I’ve spoken to some of their clients who said they would go for that.”

Shares of Google rose $5.93 to $477.73 in morning trading.

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