SCN: Search engines

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

==========================


(J.D. Lasica, Online Journalism Review)---Many of us in the new 
media industry have watched in despair during the past few months 
as several major search engines have abandoned all pretense at 
editorial integrity by adopting deceptive, misleading advertising 
practices at the expense of their users. Finally, someone has stood 
up and said, Enough is enough. And now it's time for the rest of us 
to join the battle as well.  

Commercial Alert, a 3-year-old consumer organization in Portland, 
Ore., founded by Ralph Nader, filed a formal complaint with the 
Federal Trade Commission last week, charging that eight of the 
major search engines were "inserting advertisements in search 
engine results without clear and conspicuous disclosure that the 
ads are ads."  

To which I say: Bravo! But also: It's not enough. Better that the 
search engines clean up their act on their own by bowing to their 
users' wishes rather than bend to government coercion.

Why should this matter to journalists, researchers and other Net 
denizens? Because search engines have become indispensable to 
our online existence as we look for ways to sensibly navigate the 
Web's 2 billion pages and 14 billion links. Seven of the 10 most 
visited Web sites are search engines. A February survey by the 
Pew Internet & American Life Project found that Internet users' top 
two activities are e-mail and online searches.  

The Net is becoming central to Americans' everyday lives. A 
nationwide survey by the Markle Foundation released this month 
found that by a huge margin, the leading metaphor in the public's 
mind for the Internet is "a library" — not "a shopping mall." But an 
increasing number of search engines don't seem to understand that. 
 
"The problem has become acute lately," says Gary Ruskin, 
Commercial Alert's executive director. "Search engines have 
become essential to the quest for learning and knowledge in the 
Internet Age, and we don't want such an important platform to be 
used to deceive the public and skew search results on behalf of 
hucksters. They've chosen crass commercialism over editorial 
integrity."  

No one, including Commercial Alert, begrudges the search engines 
their right to turn a profit and make an honest buck. It's the honest 
part that's at issue.  

Here's what has happened: As the dot-com meltdown and economic 
slowdown have combined to pummel online ad revenues, Internet 
companies, including search engines, have scrambled to come up 
with other ways to staunch the flow of red ink.  

Search engines have increasingly turned to two significant revenue 
streams:  

....Paid placement: In addition to the main editorial-driven search 
results, the search engines display a second — and sometimes third 
— listing that's usually commercial in nature. The more you pay, the 
higher you'll appear in the search results.  

....Paid inclusion: An advertiser or content partner pays the search 
engine to spider its site and include the results in the main editorial 
listing. The result? A site is more likely to see its pages appear in a 
search result, but there are no guarantees.  

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with either of these business 
revenue streams. A user who enters "star wars" into a search 
engine may be doing research on the Strategic Defense Initiative - 
or she may want to buy plastic action figures.  

The trouble is that many search engines have gone to great lengths 
to fuzz the line between editorial and commercial listings. "This is a 
breach of the editorial-advertising line," Ruskin says. "We don't 
oppose advertising, of course. We just support editorial integrity."  

Commercial Alert's complaint names Lycos, HotBot, AltaVista, 
LookSmart, MSN.com, Netscape, iWon and Direct Hit, owned by Ask 
Jeeves. All eight display paid listings in addition to objective, 
algorithm-based results, but they call them "Featured Links" or 
"Partner Results" rather than disclosing that they're paid by 
sponsors. In addition, MSN, Alta Vista and LookSmart accept 
payments for inclusion in their editorial results.  

So, for example, LookSmart returns three listings: Featured Listings 
(paid listings), Directory Topics (spidered results) and Reviewed 
Web sites (including paid listings). Clear as a bell, no?  

Notably missing from the list are Google, Yahoo and Excite, three of 
the industry's leaders, which clearly are wearing the white hats in 
this contest.  

Google, especially, has consistently staked out the high ground, 
telling Interactive Week: "We think if we're the only ones out there 
with a reputation for integrity in our search results, that can only be 
good for us." A second Google spokesperson told 
Searchenginewatch.com: "Our search engine results represent our 
editorial integrity, and we have no plans to alter our automated 
processes."  

Google publishes paid listings, but clearly marks them as 
"Sponsored Links." And it has bucked the commercial tidal wave by 
not using paid inclusions. Chaste almost to a fault, Google won't 
display search results for tens of thousands of pages that it has 
already crawled and indexed for internal use by corporate partners 
such as Cisco and MarthaStewart.com — because it doesn't want to 
show favoritism to its business clients. A rare virtue in these times.  

Fittingly, last Wednesday Google Inc. won the Webby Award for best 
practices, a new category that honors a single site that serves as a 
model of overall excellence.  

Danny Sullivan, editor of Searchenginewatch, has been one of the 
more seasoned observers of the portal business in recent years, 
keeping tabs on paid placements and paid inclusions by all the 
major search engines.  

Sullivan, speaking by phone from Shrewton, England, is no anti-
business zealot. He observes, smartly, that search engines are still 
underutilized by advertisers seeking highly targeted audiences. "It 
amazes me that there's been so little written about this aspect of 
search engines," he says. "There are very few places where people 
tell you exactly what they want, in real time. Banner ads are a poor 
tool to respond to those requests. The ability to interact with the 
users right within a search results area - that's gold to the 
advertisers."  

And it should be gold to users, too - if it's done on the up and up. 
"We're seeing sites all over the Web displaying skyscraper ads and 
popup ads that are untargeted, intrusive, in-your-face," Sullivan 
says. "We should be clamoring for more targeted commercial 
search results, because they just might be relevant to my needs. 
People need to understand that if you don't support the sponsored 
areas, the alternative is an all-commercial zone."  

That's the big fear that Sullivan often hears from webmasters: that 
search engines will eventually offer nothing but paid listings. 
"That's not why most of us are on the Internet," he says. "It's more 
than just an online Yellow Pages."  

Writing a feature article on Aimee Mann? A business backgrounder 
on Dell? A medical story on Propecia? A travel piece on Maui? Get 
ready to wade through a torrent of commercial come-ons first when 
researching your story.  

"This is like one day opening your newspaper and finding it filled 
with nothing but ads," says Sullivan, who has covered the subject in 
essays such as Buying Your Way Into Search Engines, Can Portals 
Resist the Dark Side? and The Evolution of Paid Inclusion.  

Both Sullivan and Ruskin point out that many of the smaller search 
engines engage in similar practices, or worse. Dogpile used to be a 
fairly useful search engine, but search the Web on Dogpile today 
and you'll find page after page of paid commercial links (from GoTo, 
FindWhat, Sprinks, ePilot, ah-ha, BrainFox and Kanoodle) before it 
displays anything remotely relevant or objective. (Studies show that 
the vast majority of users don't bother looking past the top 30 
results.) Also falling from grace into the pitfires of hell is Disney's 
Go, which once operated one of the slickest search engines on the 
Web in Infoseek but now merely coughs up results from GoTo's 
commercial engine.  

What's the reaction of search engines to all this? LookSmart and 
Alta Vista issued statements dismissing the charges as groundless. 
A few weeks earlier, LookSmart's CEO, Evan Thornley, told the San 
Francisco Chronicle his managers did not even raise the subject of 
ethics when the company adopted a pay-for-placement program last 
month. "We can't afford to have ideological debates anymore," he 
huffed.  

Sarah Lefko, a product manager for MSN.com, added that surveys 
by Microsoft show that consumers already assume that all search 
results are for sale. (How conveniently self-serving - and what 
rubbish.)  

Matt Stoever, a vice president at Lycos, told the New York Times: 
"We thought long and hard and decided it doesn't matter if we are 
paid for a link, so long as the results are what the user wants. The 
industry has trained users to avoid anything that looks commercial. 
By calling them paid listings, it hurts the user."  

Such is the arrogant, Alice-in-wonderland, upside-down world of 
Internet executives these days. Black is white, profit is all, and the 
entire Internet is filled with callow users who are either (a) so cynical 
that they assume all search results are bought and paid for, or (b) 
clueless droids who have somehow been goaded into ignoring 
wonderfully useful commercial listings.  

Says Ruskin: "Their arguments aren't credible. If what they're 
claiming is true, why wouldn't they be straight with the users and 
reveal that their ads are ads? The fact that they're hiding and 
obfuscating that fact proves that it's balderdash."  

Ruskin says it's too early to tell whether the FTC will move 
aggressively to act on the organization's complaint, noting that 
chairman Timothy J. Muris took over the agency's reins only last 
month. But he notes there are extensive precedents for the FTC to 
intervene. "For example, they've repeatedly told makers of 
infomercials that they have to disclose to the public that they're paid 
ads rather than independent programming," he says.  

Personally, I'm not counting on the Bush appointees on the FTC to 
defend my interests as a consumer. I'm voting with my mouse clicks 
by doing my searches on Google and Yahoo.  

But I also think the out-of-touch search engines could use some 
interaction with their audience. Ruskin agrees: "Yes, we're hoping 
that users will switch to sites that have more editorial integrity, and 
that they'll make their voices heard. It's a very simple request: We 
don't want trickery."  

Here's the message I hope the search engines will hear and begin 
to heed:  

We want our search results clean and unsullied. Display your paid 
listings, too, in a separate area, but be honest and upfront about 
them. Tell us your practices in a straightforward disclosure 
statement, and make it easy to find. Don't deceive us, and don't 
belittle us by saying we're too shallow to care about editorial 
integrity.  


Copyright 2001 Online Journalism Review






* * * * * * * * * * * * * *  From the Listowner  * * * * * * * * * * * *
.	To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to:
majordomo at scn.org		In the body of the message, type:
unsubscribe scn
==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ====
* * * * * * *     http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/     * * * * * * *