The Federal Trade Commission remains concerned that consumers may not be able to tell when search results are advertiser-sponsored, thanks to sometimes-unclear disclosure on the part of search companies.
Last year, the FTC notified Web operators -- including Yahoo-owned AltaVista and America Online -- that they must clearly mark advertisements that appear within their search results. Though some reform trickled through the industry, questions still linger about how well companies label the commercial listings that appear when Web surfers delve into their indices.
The US regulatory agency said that so far, it's pleased with efforts to disclose ads as "sponsored" when they appear on top or adjacent to query results. But a more-complex form of paying for exposure within search results -- called paid inclusion -- remains worrisome for consumer watchdogs and the FTC.
Paid inclusion is a class of search marketing in which companies, such as Yahoo-owned Inktomi, accept fees to "crawl" Web sites more often so that fresh product data is included in the index. In Inktomi's case, some marketers pay when Web surfers click on their listings. Typically, those paid-for links are not marked.
"We want the search engines to be cognisant that these are issues we hope they approach and make disclosure as visible as possible, so that consumers understand what they're pulling up and that there's some advertising linked to it," said Heather Hipsley, an assistant director for the FTC's division of advertising practices.
"There's more work to be done because it's an ever-evolving issue. Search engines are very dynamic, and there's been a lot of mergers in the area," Hipsley said.
Yahoo is a target of concern because in the last year it bought three of the largest Web crawlers that operate paid-inclusion programmes: Inktomi, AltaVista and Fast's AlltheWeb. It acquired AltaVista and AlltheWeb when its deal with their parent company Overture Services went through last week. Yahoo has said that it hopes to augment earnings from search with paid inclusion.
