Fairfax Media hopes to get a slice in the booming Internet search market by acting as a middleman between the search engines and small advertisers, The Age reported.

The media company has begun a joint venture with Web site domain name registrar Melbourne IT, to resell pay-per-click advertising for searches on Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

Google's and Yahoo's business model is based on the advertisements showed alongside the search results. The selection of advertisements depends on users' search inquiries, with higher-paying advertisers given priority.

The new company, Advantate, will target companies that have no staff or advertising agencies to organise advertising deals with search engines, according to the article posted on Asia Media.

"It gets us into the fastest-growing piece of the pie, which is search," said Fairfax Digital Chief Executive Jack Matthews. "We'll manage the bidding (for advertising space) for them and then we'll give them... a report that shows how well we did."

Advantate would also target small businesses that do not operate a website, Matthews added.

"This is a fantastic way, we think, to access people who want to be online and want to market themselves online but they just don't have the resources to actually have a deep website, so it's the equivalent of an online Yellow Pages," Matthews told The Age.