WebWatch: Search Engines Continue To Obscure Paid Placement

Major search engines, including Yahoo!, aren't doing enough to highlight instances when marketers have paid to be included in search results, according to a study released Thursday by Consumer Reports' WebWatch.

The report, "Still in Search of Disclosure," is a follow-up to a November study, which concluded that many search engines do not clearly disclose which results have been paid for and which are organic. For the report, WebWatch looked at the same 15 search engines studied last year to determine whether their policies had changed. The majority of the search engines examined had made no change, or had become even worse since last year. According to the report, seven of the engines made few or no changes, three search engines improved their policies, and, at five search engines, information about paid placement or inclusion became even more scarce.

"Unfortunately for consumers, many of the changes have not been for the better," the study stated. "Comparing current levels of disclosure among search engines with those a year ago, we found that some of the best have gotten worse, a few of the worst have gotten better, and roughly half have remained more or less the same."

The study covered popular search engines including Google, MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, and Ask Jeeves. Webwatch testers judged the companies based on how well they complied with 2002 Federal Trade Commission recommendations that search engines include "clear and conspicuous disclosure" of paid placement and inclusion.

The study, involving queries on the term "digital cameras," concluded that Google and AOL continue to follow good practices, but that Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves have made it harder to discern whether an advertiser has paid for inclusion in the results. Yahoo! has changed its bright red disclosure headings to light gray, and removed the paid placement and paid inclusion hyperlinks, and its single link to its disclosure page is "easy to miss," stated the report. Ask Jeeves had made its disclosure headings more faint, removed the hyperlinks to disclosure pages, and made those pages harder to find, the study said.

Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves did not comment by press time.

The study author, Jorgen Wouters, indicated that the failure to prominently disclose whether a marketer had paid to be included in the results misleads consumers. "Our previous studies have shown that 60 percent of consumers surveyed did not know that search engine results included paid advertisements along with non-paid results, and when they found out the truth, they were angry," said Wouters in a statement. "Search engines need to understand that these practices and omissions, when exposed, matter to consumers--their customers."

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