Consumer Reports WebWatch Report Critical of Search Engines
June 10, 2005
eWeek.com has an article about a new Consumer Web Watch report. The report found that many search engines are getting worse when it come to disclosing what is a paid advertisement.
Among the five major search sites -- Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., MSN, America Online Inc. and Ask Jeeves Inc. -- Yahoo and Ask Jeeves were cited for making their headings fainter and their disclosure statements harder to find.
"If you want to call attention to something on a page you put headline above it, [but] you don't make it smaller and more faint," said Beau Brendler, director of Consumer Reports WebWatch.
Yahoo also received the most criticism about its paid inclusion program, since it is the only engine among the top five to still use the practice, and because one way it charges included sites is based on the number of clicks on their listings.
