Search engines still aren’t doing enough to indicate which search results are natural and which are the result of paid placement by marketers, according to a study released yesterday by Consumer Reports’ Web Watch.
The report is titled “Searching for Disclosure” and is the result of more than 6 months of testing on the Web’s top 15 most-trafficked engines. These same engines were looked at last year in a simliar study. According to the report, 7 of the engines made few or no changes to the way they present results, 3 improved their policies, and 5 engines actually made the information more difficult to find.
Google and AOL were lauded as examples of companies following appropriate disclosure practices while Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves were criticized for making disclosure information less transparent.
Read more here.
