Whatever happened to the search engines disclosure of paid placement and paid inclusion?

By Lars Våge

(December 6 2004) More than two years ago Pandia as well as Internetbrus reported that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had demanded that search engines should show clearly which search results were sponsored and which were not.

A letter sent by the FTC to seven search engines had the effect that many of them did make an effort in this direction. Many of them started including pages with informative texts about what kind of links they were actually displaying on the search result pages.

The consumer's organization Consumer WebWatch has done three studies during the last years of searcher's awareness of search related advertising (paid placement) and of the practice of charging money for indexing certain web sites more often than others (paid inclusion).

Their latest study, In search of disclosure, was recently published online. It describes how search services make their visitors aware of the presence of advertisements among search results.

During the period this study was done two of the largest search engines decided to stop offering paid inclusion.

As regards the search engines' practice of informing about paid placement, there has been some progress. There is still plenty of room for improvement, though.

The study analyzed 1500 users of 15 of the largest search engines. Among the conclusions were these:

• None of these search engines succeeded in making a good explanation of their paid inclusion practices.
• The metasearch services in the study failed to adequately point out occurrences of paid inclusion and paid placements among their search results.
• The information that is available on these subjects is hard to find because the links and headlines are not prominent.
• The texts informing about advertising and how it effects the search results are often confusing and riddled with jargon.
• On the other hand, certain search services -- like e.g. Google -- keep the pay per click text ads well separated from regular search results.

See also Pandia's article "Searchers find it hard to distinguish between regular and paid results" (May 2003) and the original 2002 article: "The US Federal Trade Commission criticize search engines for unmarked text ads"

This article was originally published in Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching that has been online since early 2001. It is written for both searchers and educators.

Internetbrus is owned and edited by Lars Våge and Lars Iselid. Lars Våge works as a librarian at Mitthögskolan and a programmer for JL Informationsteknik. Lars Iselid is a librarian at the Umeå University Library, freelance journalist for the computer magazine Datormagazin, He can be found blogging under the pseudonym Cyrille at Iaslash.org.

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