Blurred line between “organic” results and “sponsored” links of leading US search engines that trick consumers
A traditionally formulated Web search with a very “pure” motivation has been consistently changing due to the rapidly moving market that often pursues or follows commercial or profitable business. Through the certain process of negotiation with advertisers, search engines display those “sponsored” ads in an efficient way that catches relevant users. Consequently, the search engines will display paid advertisements that match the user’s query. This kind of business is highly used by big search engines since it successfully and enormously generates profit for them. And this relationship between search engines and advertisers goes on with CPC, auctions that set prices, VCG etc that were discussed in this course.
The changing trend of formulated web search is not a problem. However, the emerging problem is that the system mentioned above is rather misused. Rather than clearly labeling and distinguishing sponsored advertisements from “natural” search results, search engines often blur the line between ads and legit results, leading to deceive consumers.
There can be two types of results when users use search engines. “Natural” or “organic” results are those that the search engine provides as the most relevant to the user’s query. The other is “sponsored” link that often appears on the sides or above the natural results. (Auction occurs in here, paying search engines).
In the past, colored shading behind sponsored links or labeling “ad” or “sponsored” existed that users could separate from the natural results. This kind of shading behind big search engines using similar tricks are so light that users can barely notice the difference (Public Citizen President Robert Weissman told The Wall Street Journal). Furthermore, labeling words such as “ad” or “sponsored” has become more inconsistent that makes viewers confusing to distinguish between paid and organic results.
Despite of recent regulation and order for search engines to clearly highlight the ads in the results in order to avoid deceiving consumers, three big engines, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft appear to ignore to comply. These unregulated actions of running deceptive ads seem to be a problem because it is stealing users’ rights away from their just and clean use of web search system. Search advertising is an enormous business and users are the crucial part of it. The situation of users almost don’t realizing what they are clicking, and unintentionally receding away from the relevant results for their query should be pointed out and challenged.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/ads-tied-to-web-searches-criticized-as-deceptive-1413226602