'Pay to Play' Engines Under Consumer Watchdog Scrutiny

• Jul. 19, 2001

MSN, Netscape Search, Direct Hit, HotBot, Lycos, AltaVista, LookSmart, and iWon are the eight search engines named in a complaint filed with the US Federal Trade Commission on July 16. The complaint was filed by Commercial Alert, a three year old consumer advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader. The complaint claims deception on the part of the named search engines revolving around the infamous "pay for placement" practice.

The basic concept of pay for placement is simple; an advertiser pays a search engine a certain amount of money to rank more highly in that engine for specified keyword searches. The problem with this model, according to commercial alert, is that the engines are forced to abandon their objective search algorithms to make way for the paid advertisers. This means that instead of receiving the results most objectively relevant to their search, internet users are getting the paid listings. The group suggests that these paid listings are being masqueraded as objective search results, as opposed to the paid advertising that they are.

To see an example of this in practice, go to Alta Vista and do a search for 'eye surgery'. You'll see the first three listings under the heading 'Partner Listings', and the remainder under 'We found 4,700,643 results'. These headings are the only differentiation between the paid listings (the Partner Listings, provided by Goto.com) and Alta Vista's own objectively pulled results. Whether or not this should be sufficient to satisfy the consumer watchdogs is a matter for the courts to decide, however we probably haven't heard the end of this. Resentment over the pay for placement model has been brewing in the Internet community for quite some time, and some backlash against the engines implementing it was a little overdue. This may be just the beginning.

Darren Downey
darren@searchengineposition.com

References:

Consumer watchdog accuses search engines of deception (Associated Press)

Internet search engines charged with deception - Andrew Quinn (Reuters)

Also see our News Archives for more information on the "pay for placement" practice.