From The Wall Street Journal: (Thanks, Harvey!)
LONDON -- Britain's famously competitive newspapers have a new battleground: Google.
Newspapers are buying search words on Google Inc. so that links to their Web sites pop up first when people type in a search. The Daily Telegraph, for example, bought the phrase "North Korea Nuclear Test" after the country detonated a nuclear device last October. People in the United Kingdom and the U.S. using English-language Google who typed the phrase into the search engine saw an ad for the Telegraph Web site on the top right of their screen.
The ad, which linked readers to a Telegraph article about the test, was labeled a "sponsored link" in small type and shaded blue on some computer screens to distinguish it from Google's own search responses.
Many papers are also tailoring their Web sites to attract Google's news site, which has links to thousands of news articles. The Times of London, owned by New York-based News Corp., is training journalists to write in a way that makes their articles more likely to appear among Google's unpaid search results. "You make sure key phrases and topic words are embedded in the top paragraph and headlines," says Zach Leonard, the paper's digital-media publisher.
Which explains why virtually every story published online by the Times of London has the words "advertise" "times" "london" in the lede. :)