A new Internet search engine that debuted last month claims it will help newspaper publishers retain their online revenue streams while allowing readers to access premium content free of charge.

Congoo founder and Chief Executive Officer Ash Nashed said his firm’s NetPass service will allow users to gain limited access to newspaper’s premium, or paid, content.

“Most of these companies want to provide some free introduction anyway,” he said, adding that Congoo currently has a number of newspaper publishing partnerships in the works.

Users get access to the content by earning points that they accrue every time they conduct a Web search after registering with Congoo, Nashed said.

Each point allows a user to view a single page of premium content offered by the search engine’s publishing partners.  

Congoo negotiates with publishers the amount of premium content they want to give to Congoo users, for example, a cap of maybe 10 or 12 articles per month, Nashed said.

Drives traffic

Congoo drives traffic to publishers’ sites by giving their content prominent placement on the search results page, Nashed said. Results are structured so that the top section of the page contains links from Congoo’s premium content partners and typical “generic” Web results - like those from Google or Yahoo - are placed below that.

“The publisher is getting showcased pretty high up and very prominently,” Nashed said. “We’re driving very qualified prospects, people who are by definition interested in their content, to their Web site.”

In addition to bringing users to the site, Nashed said his engine also eliminates the need for users to register online or to provide a credit card number.

Already registered

“They’ve already registered with us and we can transfer the registration information with the user’s permission to the publisher,” Nashed said. “The publisher is then getting a much higher conversion rate on that registration information, so now they can market that to the user (as part of the privacy policy terms and conditions). They can send e-mails to those users and try get them to sign up as a subscriber - and they’re getting the traffic and the page views, which they can sell ads against.”

Being prominently featured also makes the publisher more relevant to the average Web user searching, Nashed said.

“The whole rationale here is that most people that are not subscribing to these publications either don’t know about them or just don’t need them that much,” he said. “We feel that we can introduce enough of those people to our publishers to make it worth their while.”

Unique service

Nashed said his company is unique in partnering with publishers to provide the service his search engine performs. Congoo has two patents for its technology, one of which is still pending. The company’s approved patent covers the transfer of registration and transactional data between a search engine result page across a subscription wall to the publisher’s Web site.

“Everything happens on the publisher’s site in terms of the viewing and that gives the publisher control and allows them to get their marketing information and run ads to that audience,” Nashed said. “We expand their audience and they get something out of it.”

The company currently has non-disclosure agreements with all of its publishers, but Nashed said the response has been enthusiastic and he plans to launch with a significant number of publishers.

Not much to lose

“There’s really not much to lose here because at the end of the day, if they have given something away, it’s to people who they would not have monetized anyway,” he said. “And we’re not giving it away so much that we cannibalize their subscription.”

NetPass is offered as a free service but Nashed believes that as users get used to having access to premium content, they may be willing to pay for the app down the road.

“Not many people would order cable or satellite if they were only going to get one or two channels, but when you get 180 channels, people start to pay,” he said. “Really it’s dependent upon publishers to band together to get enough critical mass of a product that people may actually be willing to pay for bundled access to unlimited subscription content.”