So, how much have meta-search tools endorsed paid positioning? More than fifty percent of the results returned from using meta-search tools were paid results.
Though not all meta-search tools will sell placement directly in their listings, most of them will let you purchase banner ads for advertising and content deals where the search engine promotes the advertiser's content in specific areas of the engine's website. Many search engine companies are careful to separate the ads from the results, but others make no such distinctions.
Consumers had almost no clue about this development in part because the paid listings looked exactly the same as the editorial results or were labeled with such vague distinctions as "Partner Search Results" or "Featured Listing" - never clearly labeling the paid arrangement.
Nearly everyone was shocked and stunned by the amount of advertising included in what they thought were "pure" searches. In 2002, a Ralph Nader consumer advocacy group named Commercial Alert filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission claiming that a lack of disclosure about paid content integrated into search results was really "deceptive advertising" in violation of the FTC's rules.
More disclosure was clearly needed and the FTC moved in that direction recently, urging the search engine industry to voluntarily improve the way it discloses paid content within search results.
To the credit of the major meta-search tools, when I conducted a similar search in March 2004, on "breast cancer" using Dogpile, thirty-one of the first sixty results were "sponsored" - in other words, paid for - but all of those results were clearly marked as sponsored results. A similar search on Overture, the paid-placement company that Yahoo! owns, all of the top forty results were sponsored but also clearly marked.
Many of the meta-search engines still do not clearly mark the results. Some designate their results only as "matching sites," or "web directory sites" or simply as "web results" without giving the user an easy way to find out if they are paid or not. While the search tools have made considerable progress in moving toward revealing sponsors, more work still needs to be done.
Progress is clear on paid placement but less clear on paid inclusion. Still, use of paid inclusion and paid placement is a quickly growing field called search engine optimization.
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08272010
1. What are search engine crawlers and what do they do
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