Gannett acquires Planet Discover

Gannett announced today that it has acquired Planet Discover, a provider of local, integrated search and advertising technology. Planet Discover provides the search engine technology that powers several newspaper and tourism sites. They also provide a Cost per Click (CPC) advertising platform for websites. Rather than showing AdSense ads from Google, the website owner sells his own ads and has a direct relationship with the advertising client.

Rather than partner with Google, Yahoo!, Ask, or Microsoft, it's interesting how Gannett has chosen buy a search company and keep it in-house. While there is some benefit to owning your own search techonology and advertising base, it would seem that someone like Google would be able to provide much better quality search engine and more advertising revenue. By using a major ad platform like Google's AdWords, the Gannett websites would benefit from the auction based system where Google's very large advertising base bids up the advertising revenue. By using thier own advertising system, Gannett has to recruit all its own advertisers and hope they will sufficiently bid up the prices to reach Gannett's user base.