Consumer Report On Paid Search Disclosure
Consumer Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, has released an 82-page paper (available in PDF format) on search engine's disclosure of paid rankings. The report, titled "In Search of Disclosure: How Search Engines Alert Consumers to the Presence of Advertising in Search Results", takes a look at which engines make sure to distinguish between paid listings and regular results. The key findings in the report:

• Paid inclusion was not satisfactorily disclosed or explained by any of the search engines tested. The credibility of this practice is of such concern to the industry itself that, after Consumer Reports WebWatch testing had been completed, two of the top five search engines announced plans to terminate paid inclusion programs.
• Meta-engines, which present results from several search engines simultaneously, repeatedly failed to adequately disclose the presence of paid placement and paid inclusion within search results.
• Disclosures are generally hard to find, accessible by headings and hyperlinks that often blend in with the page, making them easy for consumers to overlook.
• Information disclosed by the sites on business practices with advertisers — and how these practices may affect search results — was often confusing and jargon-laden.
• Some engines, like Google – one of the few majors not named in the original FTC complaint – took pains to visually segregate paid results from non-paid results. Consumers may want to avoid others, like 1st Blaze, because of inadequate or absent disclosures that undermine the integrity of search results.

The article distinguishes between paid placement, where companies pay for certain rankings, and paid inclusion, where companies pay to be indexed. However:

These results are typically presented as the so-called "main" results, making it all too easy for consumers to mistake them for "pure" results, when, in fact, they are not.

The study continuously gives Google a lot of credit for being the only company not to "be evil" and muddy up their search results with paid (and by definition inaccurate) listings. I think paid inclusion and placement have always been terrible ideas, and it's good to see it finally dying, thanks to Google's unprecedented success with honest search results.
(via Search Engine Watch Blog and John Battelle's Searchblog)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 11/08/2004 08:47:00 PM