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Search Engine Payola
QwkHyenA writes: "Seems that Ralph Nader and his Consumer Watchdog group has fired the first shot in pegging 8 search engines for reshuffling query results based on fees paid to them. Like we didn't see this happening! Nader has asked the FTC to look into this based on deceptive advertising practices..." Check out the complaint, which itself references pages like this one detailing how to pay for placement at all the major search engines.
It comes down to what the search engine says.
You can't say "provides the best results to match your query", and then give you "whatever results we were paid to give you".
If you can find a search engine that says "search for the top sites on the web that paid us money", then that would be honest and nothing to complain about.
Do you have any idea how many MILLIONS of people Microsoft has conned into "clicking the wrong button" that takes them to an MSN search page? Some versions of MSIE will redirect there any time a DNS lookup fails.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Previous posters have brought up some poor analogies. Newspaper ads are clearly ads (and newspapers can get in serious trouble when this isn't the case). The yellow pages are entirely advertisement.
A better example is infomercials . These are clearly a `free service', too, as is all of broadcast television. That emphatically does not exempt them from the requirement to clearly distinguish paid ads from normal programming.
Now, you could argue about whether or not paid-for placement between `normal' links is the same as a tv commercial which is paid for in-between `normal' programming, but it's not a completely unreasonable stretch.
It seems to me that Altavista's "featured sites" are just as clearly separated from the main results as Google's "sponsored links" -- or perhaps "featured" isn't as clear as "sponsored"?
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Anyway, whadya mean the government? Which government? It's bad enough what your government does to you (and mine to me) without them meddling in each others stuff.
--
the telephone rings / problem between screen and chair / thoughts of homocide
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
We don't have a free market economy in the
sense you describe. The government must
intervene to keep order and enforce ethical
behavior.
What if pharmaceutical companies made fradulent
claims about their drug products? Is that
okay as long as we have the almighty "free market"? You seem to be suggesting that
it is better to have a "free market" than to
enforce ethical behavior.
Gee, I'm sorry your mom died but she shouldn't
have been so stupid and believed those pills
would actually lower her blood pressure.
I don't know how it got into your head that
honesty and decency is outweighed by profit,
but I find it very sad.
Companies are unable to ethically self-regulate
and this is why we need the FDA and other
oversight organizations, as well as pro-consumer
groups.
-Kevin
It's getting to be quite uncommon to see a topic posted on slashdot without someone railing against it with a reply along the lines of: "So? What's the big deal? It's not like I care."
The point I'm trying to make is that whether or not you care, yourself, is exactly as interesting - to you - as it is to others to have opinions of their own. Whether or not you personally mind using search engines where the content returned might have more to do with financial transactions that you remain ignorant of, or the fact that they exist at all, doesn't make it a poor story.
Running a search engine certainly isn't free, but if you want to make up for that by changing what a search engine IS, or at least what it is commonly (and perhaps naively) perceived to be, without telling anyone about it, then that most certainly is deceptive advertising.
The right of search engines to charge money for returning their result isn't in question, it's how they do it that is the issue. When you ask your teacher at school how to solve a particular problem, you expect him to answer to the best of his ability, not according to what he's paid to say, right? And if what he tells you is influenced by some form of remuneration, whether it's secret or not, wouldn't you prefer to be told about it?
It's all about playing an open game. It's what MSNBC do whenever they mention Microsoft and add a comment to the effect that MSNBC is a joint venture held by, among others, Microsoft. It's about confessing to a prejudice when you're asked for an opinion. If you don't reveal whatever motivation that might slant what you say, then you must accept that people who discover this motivation later could come to see what you said, and perhaps you yourself, in a new light.
We all agree that telling something that isn't the truth is deceptive, but to not tell something which is true seems to be more of a gray area.
Garth Algar: Here, take two of these.
Wayne Campbell: Ahh, Nuprin. Little, yellow, different.
Imagine the absurdity: let's say you're some R&D manager covering a few groups and you want to index your intranet (which has documentation and interface descriptions for all internal-use and skunkworks projects, as well as docs for local tools and local mods to tools). What's the first thought that comes to your mind? I can bet my ass it's not "Eureka! I'll license the engine from www.dogpile.com! Failing that, I'll go for askjeeves.com or some other shill-engine!" Nope. Pay-for-rank and pay-for-inclusion have merely castrated the already-ineffectual engines backing the "web portal" sites. Even if they had any cred before they ran out of VC, they CERTAINLY don't now.
[1] IIRC, Altavista once sold "personal AltaVista" and "workgroup Altavista" products, but I believe they were unsuccessful and are no longer available -- I think they were discontinued shortly before AV went to pay-to-improve-rank as a business model. Mea culpa if I'm wrong.
Maybe AltaVista was worthwhile three or four years ago. Maybe five people have ever used Netscape or MSN search on purpose, but those are things one accidentally uses by clicking the wrong button in her browser. However, none of these companies has a real business strategy -- if they weren't selling placement, they'd be selling your personal data to x10.com. Selling placement is merely the third or fourth step on the road to fuckedcompany.com.
Uh, maybe because it's not a crap engine? Anybody who says they only use Google is instantly flagging themselves as someone who doesn't know dick about web searching, because Google has some big holes in it. It munges stop words within phrases, it can't do stemming (to Google, a "rocket" has no relationship to "rockets"), no wildcard support, and no "or" support come to mind. Try using a metasearch engine like ixquick sometime and you'll see all the stuff that Google misses.
On the topic of searching, anybody who uses IE 5 or above (read: most of Slashdot) who does a lot of searching should check grab the IE Web Accessories (they work for IE6, too) and make use of the Quick Search feature. Instead of going to Google and then searching for "Hungry Hippos", just type in your URL box or Open dialog 'gg "Hungry Hippos"' (without the single quotes), and it'll shoot you to the appropriate results page. Results no good and you want to check AltaVista? Just enter 'av "Hungry Hippos"' and there you are.
It comes with a bunch of sites already programmed (AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek, InfoSeek Ultra, Lycos, MetaCrawler, Magellan, OpenText, WebCrawler, and Yahoo), and you can add your own. Plus you can basically use it for any web query that's looking for a single field — you just stick in %s where the term(s) you're searching for should go. So, in addition to the search engines that I've added (Google, Northern Light, ixquick, and Raging Search), I've also set it to access UPS tracking, the W3C's CSS validator, MSN Dictionary, Google Groups, Netcraft, and the W3C's HTML validator. So, instead of going to Netcraft and entering a site in the textbox, I just do a "nc www.apple.com" and the web server that Apple's using is the next thing I see. ("nc" being my alias for Netcraft).
You can make your own, but just to get you started, here's my own list of custom queries:
css - http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=% s&warning=1&profile=css2s f e=off&site=groupse b&cmd=process_search&query=%s% s&orl== %sn e
di - http://dictionary.msn.com/find/entry.asp?search=%
dj - http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%s&hl=en&lr=&sa
gg - http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
ix - http://ixquick.com/do/metasearch.pl?cat=web&cat=w
nc - http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=%s
nl - http://www.northernlight.com/nlquery.fcg?cb=0&qr=
rs - http://ragingsearch.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?q
val - http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=%s&doctype=Inli
(Hope I didn't mess up the cut-and-paste job — it comes from an email I wrote to some fellow workers lately — and I know this turned into a long post, but this feature really is a great time saver. It's one of those things where you get annoyed whenever you have to use somebody else's computer and they don't have it installed. So, just thought I'd point it out to anyone who might not have tried it before. Oh, and it looks like Slashdot's entering extra spaces into the URLs, so if you want to copy them, make sure to remove the spaces.)
Cheers,
And you go out of business because the customers choose not to come to your crooked horrible store
Um, no, its much worse than that.
If you are allergic to walnuts and buy a food because it says "no walnuts", but it does, and you die, you have a bigger problem than simply "oops, just don't shop there again".
When a hospital buys supplies, it expects that syringes and gauze labelled "sterile" are, in fact sterile according to the legal requirements of that word. If we can label anything "sterile" we like, a lot of folks are going to die of infections before we "punish" the vendor by taking our business elsewhere.
That "punishment" doesn't seem very useful, seeing as how they just killed a lot of people by lying and now they get to sell their same product for the same purpose to other hospitals (probably under a different company name).
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
is a non-capitalistic action
That's okay, we're a non-capitalist country (and definitely a non-laissez-faire country).
We're also not a democracy.
We have found that setting up any system at the extreme end of a scale tends to be counter-productive.
Have an economy with some regulations, minimal requirements for disclosure, and significant financial oversight, and the rest of it can be pretty free-going.
besides the fact that there is not necessarily lying taking place here
Of course. That's what "investigation" means. They want to find out if there is or isn't.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Last time I checked we lived in a free market economy
One of the fundamental tenets of capitalism is that the free market only works efficiently with accurate information.
Misrepresenting (also called "lying" by normal people) your product or business in order to decieve the public is not a right of a company (at least in our country).
Whether the search engines are misrepresenting themselves and services is what Nader is asking to investigate.
"We can say what we want to sell our stuff, and by the way did I mention this cures cancer?" is not a particularly compelling argument.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
this is insightful. somebody mod this up please!
Just raise the taxes on crack.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Who here uses anything but Google? Hey you, you in the back, what the hell are you doing with Excite? Just put AltaVista down, and nobody will get hurt. Come on, Nader. Anybody who's not a newbie or a moron uses Google, and Google clearly marks their ads. I'm amazed the other search engines are still in business. Maybe they won't be much longer (CMGI is AltaVista's parent corp.).
This is the free market taking care of things without government intervention. There's a prefectly good alternative (Google), it's free, and it's honest. Why complain to the FTC when you could just use Google? Caveat emptor, and all.
Who cares if lusers use MSN? Google does a good business, it's free, and it works really well. If lusers want to use MSN, then that's their punishment. Eventually, they'll figure things out and switch to google. There's nothing stopping them. On the other hand, maybe some people use MSN because it's actually the best thing out there for their needs. Maybe they like the integrated content on the MSN site (something google doesn't have). Who are you to take away their choice?
In all likelyhood, if the FTC steps in to regulate search engines, it will make things terribly complicated and fuck up good search engines like Google. Why do that when it's unnecessary? Giving people easy choices is good enough. It's not the government's responsibility to protect stupid people from making bad choices. You can lead a horse to water...
Disclaimer: I've never used MSN. I have no idea if it sucks or is better than Google. I'm debating under the assumption that nysus is correct in calling MSN a "crap engine".
They list five ways to buy your way into a search engine. The first three all refer to clearly-marked advertiser content (their vague descriptions make the practices sound more underhanded than they actually are).
The fourth is a semi-legitimate beef, but the only perpetrator is Inktomi/Linksmart (whom they list a total of eight times in a goofy effort to inflate the severity of the 'problem').
The fifth (paying for editorials) is a gray area, since editorials (unlike correctly ordered search results) aren't free, and someone has to pay the electric bill. As long as you can't pay for a good editorial, who cares? Reviewers have been getting freebies since forever -- the will to honestly criticize a benefactor's product is what separates good reviewers from bad.
There are kernels of truth in the article, but they are fully obscured by the stool.
cheers,
mike
Come on now ... no one's saying this isn't their right. The question is whether it ethical to do so without informing users, and I think most would agree that it isn't. I certainly wouldn't want to use such a search engine.
... good for them.
Incidentally, Google was not mentioned
Hmm...here's some example:
Search: lung cancer
Results:
* Phillip Morris page claiming there is no relation to cigarettes and lung cancer
* Phillip Morris page announcing that YOU are the lucky winner of $2.00 off your next carton!
...
Search: open source
* Microsoft page spreading FUD
* Microsoft page unveiling their new "Shared Source" program
...
Search: Emacs
Results:
* vi
* vi
* vi
* vi
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Slashdot is already slammed as an Open Source mouthpiece, and is blatently, obviously, unashamedly pro-Open Source. On the other hand, newspapers like the New York times are trusted, and religiously read by people all over for general news, and claim to be neutral. I sure would be pissed off if the New York times masqueraded pieces paid by other companies as "news" (and NOT tell me about it). This is exactly what's going on with the search engines. They should at least say something like: "We sneak paid advertisements into search results, so don't really trust our results". Of course they are not going to do that.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Did you notice how rare those "sponsored links" are on Google?
I searched for "bookstores", and "books" and got exactly one sponsored link each (and neither was Amazon.com).
When I searched for "linux" I got none.
According to goto.com's listing, the page owner pays $0.48 per click-through.
And what, may I ask, is wrong with that? I fail to see how higher placement without a big red line that says "this placement was paid for" (which would most certainly result in the search engines' fees being lowered due to reduced demand) constitutes "deceptive advertising". Come on, people, they're not claiming that a paid ad that pops up on "britney spears n00d" can cure cancer!
Why does it matter if someone paid for higher placement or not? If the higher placement results in items that the user of the earch engine finds useful, then no harm done. If it results in complete hogwash being promoted to the top, then the search engine loses credibility (ergo revenue), which no search engine is interested in doing.
Nader is just doing what he's done all his life -- making sure that business in general will collapse under the weight of a ten-foot-high stack of regulations. Why he is doing this is really not something I care to speculate on.
Oh no, they're not swayed or biased in any way. They post the truth, no matter how it affects the parent company. No reporter is ever told that a story should be buried..
2) It's kinda funny to me how many people respond to this strictly in terms of capitalism. What ever happened to democracy? I realize that the original promise of the 'Net is drying up faster than liquid nitrogen, but still, someone needs to say it.
There is no democracy in business. The CEO is god, and you do what s/he says.
Let's imagine that Google goes out of business. Poof -- suddenly you can't do a search without having to turn to a paid search engine. Yeah, yeah, search engines suck anyway, but... unless I am running linuxisbitchin.org, they are a good way to get people to come to my site (I run a humor site and do not blanch at appearances of .aol in my logs). However, if $$$ is causing me to be marginalized, that ceases to be a tool for me.
Are you trying to make money on your site? Or is it just 'for fun'? If it's for fun, and it's a good site, you will be just fine with the internet version of 'word of mouth'. If you're trying to make money on it, how the hell do you think business work without investment capital? There are only so many commercial spots, you pay for the top spot. The cost of the top spot is determined by the demand generated for that spot. It's called supply and demand. You are getting free advertising anyways, and your whining about not being first in the list?
Ultimately, it seems to me the barrier to entry is being raised here. I understand quite well that search engines are not the only way to promote a site, but from a strictly democratic point of view, this leaves one in a situation that's like running for President with nothing but a bunch of bumper stickers, while your competition has access to the airwaves.
A barrier to entry? Do you show up in the search? Yes. Then who cares. You just got FREE ADVERTISIING. A search engine IS ALL ADVERTISING. If you're not willing to pay for GOOD advertising, then yes, you are running for president using a refirgerator box and a sharpie. Only a moron would do that, then whine when he gets no votes.
3) A philosophical question, really. The airwaves are supposed to be a public resource, according to the FCC charter. Since the airwaves are regularly sold lock, stock, and barrel to companies that couldn't possibly give a shit about the public good despite this, what protects the Internet, given that the infrastructure is owned by a zillion institutions and there is no charter to speak of?
The Internet is NOT airwaves. You can put up any site you want, at any time you want, and have EVERYONE in the world visit your site for a meager $5/mo at a hosting company. No restrictions. At least, nothing like the 'real' airwaves. Now you're whining that your advertisting (serch engine = The WORLD's YellowPages) should be free? Hell. Why should I have to pay $5/mo for someone to 'store' my message? That should be free too. And my Internet Access should be free, because I already bought a PC, and I have a radio, and the radio is free, so why not the internet?
*Havokmon slaps all of Slashdot with a Tuna.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
essentially, they're trying to masquerade the paid links as normal, objective search data, to make it seem like the paid links are somehow more "relevant" to a search.
Unfortunately for your argument, there's no such thing as an "objective" search. Search engines use a variety of fuzzy, human constructed metrics to return their results: e.g. page rank, the number of times the search phrase appears, etc. It's not difficult to argue that a site which can afford to pay is likely to be more important than a site which can't.
If search engines want to use payment as a criteria, more power to them. It's ultimately up to the consumer to decide whether to use the search engine based on his perception of whether the search engine gives him the relevant search results.
Why should they? Search Engines are dot coms. They are companies. Their one and only purpose in existing is to make money, not to help you find "+hot +xxx +monkeys" with the utmost efficiency. They do a pretty good job, even if they do tweak the output a bit.
What nobody seems to understand is that nobody has an intrinsic "right" to receive pure search results. If you want them, write your own search engine.
Got Rhinos?
Microsoft spokesman Matt Pilla said MSN is delivering "compelling search results that people want."
Too bad the people they reference are advertisinge execs.
and I saw they weren't listed as one of the companies they wanted the FTC to investigate.
It's lying. Read the freaking article--it isn't a complaint that they accept paid advertisements. The complaint is about search sites that mix the paid advertisements in with the ACTUAL results, providing no way for a viewer to know whether a site is actually relevant to your query, or just a site that paid the search engine some money.
This is nothing more than lying.
See how it specifically points out Google, which has clearly marked "SPONSORED LINKS" at the top of your query results, with the actual relevant results below that? That is perfectly fine.
Read first, then post.
(karma whore)
Isn't this exactly what the phone company does when they publish the Yellow Pages? Certain companies have simple listings with only their name, phone number and address. Others have quarter-page three-color ads that pop out at you when browsing a particular catergory. Maybe the yellow pages are more like Yahoo than a conventional search engine, but the idea is still the same (looking for listings based on key words).
I have no idea what I did to get placement like that. And I'm not even selling anything.
..."look like information from an objective database selected by an objective algorithm. But really they are paid ads in disguise."
Where is this magical search engine that looks like the description above. I've never come across anything like it whilst searching the web.
Get the Hell off my planet, you slimy mobster Bush!
As we all know google puts those sites that are linked to the most at the top of the search results. I don't know of any others that claim to do this.
,AKA 50% of your voters,.
I automatically assume on sites like AOL that search results where prioritized by amount of money paid to AOL by a site, using their search engine this becomes self evident in a matter of seconds. AOL Keyword: _sponsors_name_here_
Now all we need is for the rest of the search engines is a "How we get results" link somewhere on the page and that link takes you to a place that says, "you see what others pay you to see". Then no one can be hunted down by Nader, who should have better things to go after like kiddy porn and doggy/donkey style sites.
Nader if you are listening: people don't care how listings are compiled. If they did then Yahoo would be a search engine and not a "Portal". They would be much more grateful to you if you found a way to stop spam and check on those privacy policies that say "we will not give your name to anyone, except our partners" which is contradicktive and misleading to anyone with an IQ under 100
Ascii artist &
For those who can't be bothered to read the links directly from the news posting, here's a little translation of the whole bit:
Commercial Alert would like the FTC to investigate whether current methods of paid placement are deceptive to consumers, and whether that deception is strong enough for FTC intervention.
Don't think they could be intentionally misleading people? I've met people who didn't know the "click here to optimize your internet connection!" button was an ad the first time they saw it. I've also met people who have a hard time distinguishing between icons in their web browser and icons on the web page. This is much more subtle than either of those examples.
Don't think this is something the FTC would bother intervening in? The complaint has a little section entitled "The FTC Has Repeatedly Sought to Stop Companies From Concealing That Their Ads Are Ads", in which they argue that point as well.
It's a very simple three point argument, summarized with bold headings above each of the points. So there's my simple pitch for reading the complaint. I think you'll find it interesting and informative, and it will take less time to read than it's taken you to get this far.
To get back to the initial post, suffice it to say that the Commercial Alert complaint is obviously not asserting that paying search engines for targeted advertisements is wrong.
Search engines are not a free service, they are a business, even if their main revenue is from advertising. This is one of the main reasons why Deja News sold the newsgroup search engine to Google. They couldn't make money from indexing Usenet so they went to the ill-received ratings service. Not that many people are going to pay Google to promote their old posts.
I'd rather have a search engine that can afford to maintain its links and continually update their content. I'd rather have a working search engine that can provide useful relative links than garbage links that have been broken since 1996.
Adversive
My cat's breath smells like cat food.
Misrepresenting information is wrong, whether it's on a website, in a magazine, on the radio, on the tv, or anywhere else. Banner ads are bad enough without having that sort of cruft invade the actual content.
The signal to noise ratio of the web has been declining steadily over the past 8 years. Search engines allow us to sift through it all. Allowing them to multiplex relevant and irrelevant (paid) advertisements disguised as valid content is extremely unethical and will furthermore compound the problem of the declining signal/noise ratio of the web.
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
Yes, and the Yellow Pages are up front about what is a paid placement and what isn't. All this group wants is for the search engines to have the same policy.
The moderation on parent post is amazing... I don't think i've even seen one post get modded so much.
No one is forcing you to use the free service of go.com, excite.com, or even google. How do you think they pay for hardware, bandwidth, and programmers? Selling banner ads won't keep a search engine going. As long as you know companies paid to be listed in bold (red, highlited, whatever) print, who cares?
all those annoying fake PC window ads... they screw up my pretty Mac view ;o)
well okay, I really want em to get rid of em cos they're one of the reasons why a lot of elderly folks are scared of the internet, it lies to them all the time, and then they feel stupid and are afraid of it...
FUD all over again... but maybe this time the D stands for Distrust... not just Doubt
I clicked:
Got friends?
I hate to break it to you, but consumers are a bunch of idiots. Every month, if not every week, you can read about someone doing something utterly stupid, so stupid that warning labels are now affixed to everything.
Do not lift push mower while it is running.
"Not for use as a flotation device" labeled on an inflatable bird smaller than my hand.
And don't even mention the Darwin awards...
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Do you look at stuff on Slashdot as 'news', or chauvinism ? Slashdot certainly bills itself as presenting news, but if another website constantly lathered itself in the same myopic tunnel-visioned puppy-love way over Microsoft or Sun products (or if it nearly exclusively ripped the many real shortcomings of Linux) it would get slammed as nothing more than a corporate mouthpiece.
They claim that non-business content (for which, the Looksmart network, for example says it will index without you forking over the green) will eventually be indexed (I think the estimate at excite was 8 weeks to index new non-business content) but I havn't seen it happen for my site...
Consider, for a moment, that the internet is a vary large library of information (techies excude the simplistic metaphor). We have ecentially turned over the library card catalogs (usually managed by libraries which are non-profit institutions) over to corporations who's goal is to make a proffit. This is an interesting choice to say the least. These companies make no commitment to index any particular content, or to index new content within a particular period... (with a few exceptions) introducing the potential to have valuable scolarly work lost amidst the noise of the internet. It's nice to have more information, but it introduces the possibility that truly valuable information is lost in the frey.
This brings into question the use of the internet as an information resource, is couneter-intuitive since this is one of it's primary and highly touted uses.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Now, before the flames start-a-rollin', consider that all these search engines need massive storage space and processing power in order to return an accurate result. Now, we have a couple of legitimate concerns:
- Hardware costs money.
- Power for the hardware costs money.
- Software costs money...even the free stuff needs to be supported by someone.
- Power and facilities for the hardware/software/staff costs money.
Let's also consider that a lot search engines suck, and that their data is not exactly accurate.If a company or entity has the resources to pay for top inclusion into a search engine, then all the more power to them. In fact, if the site has a legitimate and verified page of information, then it _should_ preceed all the junk and garbage from an unverifiable source. I certainly don't expect an entity that can actually pay for search inclusion to waste their hard earned cash (or investors' cash if you will) on a pitiful entry. Yes, payment for service is certainly more verifiable than keywords from Joe Schmoe's random website that got crawled last year.
I'm assuming that evil marketing staff isn't involved in this yet...hence my point of view.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
This is one of those times I think the phrase "Company X makes no guarantees about the usability of Product Y."
So what if they re-prioritize results based on paid submissions? It's a free service. Are these "consumer watchdog" groups actually implying that site contents have to be accurate, useful, or impartial?
While they're at it, maybe they should go after The Onion for offering free Israeli homelands for all non-arab refugees.
How about shutting down /. for dispensing legal advice from a bunch of unlicenced crackpots.
What's the big deal even if people don't know what they are getting? If I run a web site and put a search engine on it, I should be able to return anything I want? What obliges me to tell a visitor if (and let's hope it never comes to this) I'm going to return goatse.cx links as the top entry for every search?
Search engines aren't a public service. Your tax dollars don't fund them. The only ones who have a beef here is companies who have paid and led to believe they're going to get top billing and then don't, but that's not what the complaint is about.
The complaint is not that search engines are accepting money to have certain links pop up towards the top of a search, it's that they're doing it without LABELING it as such - essentially, they're trying to masquerade the paid links as normal, objective search data, to make it seem like the paid links are somehow more "relevant" to a search.
But god forbid anyone actually read the tiny article... that'd be far harder than just spouting your mouth off to look clever.
The Free desktop that Just Works
It's ok not to read the article, but if you don't, then don't post!
That's fairly short-sighted. You assume that customers who are being lied to will somehow figure it out, and that without regulations and legal action they'll be able to prevent the same deception in the future. The government *is* the means through which customers fight back. Corporations are licensed (employed) *by* the government to serve the public, and when they abuse this privilege the people use the government to 'fire' or (more likely) penalize them. What's at issue here I think, is that there's many a capitalist posing as a libertarian, who would love to tell you about how the horrible government wants to push communistic restrictions on poor Corporate America. Nevermind giving consumers a mechanism to fight greed and deception when they threaten the rights and freedoms of all people, from a CEO to a garbage man. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why a business entity, that has to abide by the constitutional rights of it's customers, would set out to destroy the entity that enforces those rights, all in the name of profit. (Serving customers who have rights, and the means to enforce those rights, doesn't maximize profits). It's as if the government is simply competition to be defeated. Let's just hope the government doesn't become the victim of a hostile takeover.
Anyway, I'm repeating myself. Let me point you to my other comment.
And somehow you did not identify the sub-journalists here? AOLSearch and iNBC are real type search engines?
Get me awa from such idiots as fast as posssible...
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Last time I checked we lived in a free market economy...
:-) )
If I run a search engine and Ford Motor Compnay pays me $x dollars a year to make it the only thing that shows up in a search of "ford", "mustang", "f-150", etc... who cares...
It's my business, my company, my website, my search engine.... Can't I do whatever the hell I want??...
Yeah... But, if I were a nice and reasonable business man I would add a notice to my site that said I take money for preffered search engine results... (But, it'd be in really small print somewhere...
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
The regulation that the letter cited is one that says ads should look like ads and not like editorial content. It's a legal issue. Maybe if Altavista had a disclaimer at the top of every page it would be kind of like the yellow pages because everyone knows that companies pay to get more space in the yellow pages.
A few points:
1) To those who say, "Hey, AltaVista is a business. Can you blame them?" Yes, we can blame them. Newspapers are a business, but you don't (well, you didn't once upon a time) see them printing corporate press releases as news.
2) It's kinda funny to me how many people respond to this strictly in terms of capitalism. What ever happened to democracy? I realize that the original promise of the 'Net is drying up faster than liquid nitrogen, but still, someone needs to say it.
Let's imagine that Google goes out of business. Poof -- suddenly you can't do a search without having to turn to a paid search engine. Yeah, yeah, search engines suck anyway, but... unless I am running linuxisbitchin.org, they are a good way to get people to come to my site (I run a humor site and do not blanch at appearances of .aol in my logs). However, if $$$ is causing me to be marginalized, that ceases to be a tool for me.
Ultimately, it seems to me the barrier to entry is being raised here. I understand quite well that search engines are not the only way to promote a site, but from a strictly democratic point of view, this leaves one in a situation that's like running for President with nothing but a bunch of bumper stickers, while your competition has access to the airwaves.
3) A philosophical question, really. The airwaves are supposed to be a public resource, according to the FCC charter. Since the airwaves are regularly sold lock, stock, and barrel to companies that couldn't possibly give a shit about the public good despite this, what protects the Internet, given that the infrastructure is owned by a zillion institutions and there is no charter to speak of?
G'nite.
Visit sunny Knowumsayin.com, home of the pork shirt.
It isn't fair to directly compare search engines to the yellow pages.
When you use the yellow pages you expect to find ads, because you're looking for a business. However, when you use a search engine you are often looking for information, and the objection is to the search engines taking advirtisments and then reporting them as containing whatever information you're looking for.
...not enough people are making it to his paysite!
Would you like to see Ralphy doing more than just posing? Click HERE!
"What! No hits?"
"Nader-sense tingling! Corruption is afoot in the search engine business"
:)
Oh and i forgot - The alternative to this (which is what the Search Engine companies will claim) is to charge for use of search engines or move to a subscription model - they are after all offering a free service
My question is did they try and charge Nader too much money for a listing ?
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
The fact that this is happening should come as no surprise. And the rub is i cant see anyway Ralph Nader or anybody else can claim this is illegal. Users dont sign and particluar agreement and most search engines make no claim of impartiality (i mean look at Yahoo for gods sake) you have a right of choice and they have as far as i know no legal right to disclose this sort of information.
Taking money for listing improvment is something companies do all the time - its how a yellow pages works - the biggest placements cost the most money. This has been going on for time and based on what the complaint and comment says they are cleary seen as 'special' links.
Altavista and other companies have been doing this for years.
I would be interested in the FCC comment on this and their response - as the usage of a search engine and choice of which one is a choice made by the consumer then one would assume that this would negate some of the arguments about uninformed consumers - the banner ads and sponsored links would convince you they were taking advertising anyway.
Most people looking for information have a rough idea what they want so advertising wont have much of an effect on them - IE if you are looking for info on Open Source then you may only want general info - so you go there; if you are shopping then you may be led to a page reanked site, but bear in mind the engines return choices and thus you are not locked into only going to one place, and if the site you go to has what you want at a good price and quick service then all good and well, if not then thats what consumer laws are for, you dont sue a search engine if an online store rips you off, regardless of where you found the link.
IMHO if you follow the line that this practice is unusual then you are gullible - Radio stations dont get paid in cash for play anymore, they just get free food, gifts, invites to parties and junkets (but NO cash !)
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....