As online news and content publishers struggle to squeeze more money from their ventures, a new startup proposes a solution.

Munich, Germany-based Proximic hopes to do away with random text ads. The startup has a new form of search technology it calls “pattern proximity” that reads information on web pages and then contextually matches that to appropriate content and advertisements.

What's different about Proximic is that it uses a widget, a piece of embedded software for adding those little windows of features. Proximic’s widget matches a particular web page to other content—from the same web site, from news sites, from Wikipedia, and from the across the web—that is constantly updated. This is particularly useful for news sites, where information is constantly changing.

The company—founded in 2001 and backed by Munich-based Wellington Partners and Holtzbrinck Group, publisher of Scientific American—announced two major publishing partners Monday: London-based The Independent newspaper and Nature Publishing Group.

While there are a number of contextual matching and discovery services—such as Aggregate Knowledge, Inform, Sphere, and Loomia—Proximic CEO Philipp Pieper says the company’s technology is fundamentally different.

Proximic’s matching technology is different from both Google’s keyword system in its Adsense program, as well as other hot areas like semantic search. Instead of matching an ad based on a particular keyword, Proximic’s algorithm essentially processes the characters on the page, parsing out unrelated content on the page, to provide the best match. The widget also provides relevant ads—using the same matching system—together with the content, under the header “infotizements.”

This on-the-fly processing is independent of the language on the page, allowing Proximic to match nonstandard language such as obscure gamer nomenclature or certain types of slang, Mr. Piepper said. This also allows Proximic to store much less data about each web page, allowing quicker searches, Mr. Pieper added.

The benefit for publishers is more page views within that publisher’s site, as well as better capture of revenue because of higher click-throughs on Proximic’s more relevant ads.

A test of the product on The Independent and Nature web sites produced highly specific results on topics such as Burma and ecology, respectively.

Proximic’s technology also beats semantic technology, Piepper said, because it does not need to spend time indexing the entire web—and constantly updating.

The close aligning of ads with content is part of a broader move toward highly targeted marketing that tries to get people to view ads as content. Google has championed this with its AdSense and AdWords programs.

Because there are no keywords, Proximic provides ways to make money from articles or pages that do not fit into neat keywords and may normally have generic Google text ads with them, IDC analyst Sue Feldman said. This could be a “game changer,” Ms. Feldman said.

Jörg Überla, the partner at Wellington who invested in Proximic, has a Ph.D. in speech recognition technology and believes Proximic’s technology is a breakthrough. “I realized it’s not just a marginal improvement to the way search algorithms work but a fundamental difference from anything I’d seen anywhere,” Mr. Uberla said.

Proximic is also part of a wider move toward syndication of content across the web—that compels publishers to find outlets for their content outside of their own destination sites. Proximic syndicates publishers’ content throughout its content network.