Commercial Alert, which formally complained about the allegedly deceptive techniques in a letter to the FTC Monday, argues that paid placement, inclusion and submission practices of the search engines result in advertisements in disguise.

The search engines named in the complaint are: Alta Vista, AOL Time Warner and its Netscape searcher, Microsoft and its MSN search, Direct Hit Technologies, iWon Inc., LookSmart and Terra Lycos.

Other search engines, particularly Google, won praise from Commercial Alert for clear, informative policies and practices.

Keyword: Deceptive?

Commercial Alert executive director Gary Ruskin told NewsFactor Network that the most egregious violation of deceptive advertising rules involves placing "ads" in and around results of Internet searches.

"People think that the results are selected from a database by an algorithm, but they're actually ads in disguise," Ruskin said. "That's just plain trickery."

Targeting paid placement, inclusion and submission on Internet search engines, Commercial Alert contends that results listed as "featured listings" or "partner search results" do not clearly indicate that some of the listed Web sites have paid to be mentioned or placed higher on the page.

"This complaint concerns the practices of paid placement and paid inclusion without clear and conspicuous disclosure that the ads are, in fact, ads," says the letter to the FTC.

Dot-Bomb Blew Integrity

The group blames the end of the dot-com advertising boom and commercialization of the Internet for the purported deceptive practices of search engines, which it says are growing worse.

"It has everything to do with the dot-com crash, but it also has to do with the total overrun of the Internet by commercialization," Ruskin said.

He told NewsFactor that search engines had previously refused to blur the line between advertising and search results based on relevance or algorithms, but added that has changed in the last year.

"During the last year, some search engines sacrificed editorial integrity for higher profits and began placing ads prominently in the results, but without clear disclosure of this practice," the Commercial Alert letter says.

"Advertisers pay the search engine companies to have their products and services listed 'high' in or near the search results. Thus, the listings look like information from an objective database selected by an objective algorithm. But really they are paid ads in disguise."

Search For Truth

While some of the Web's most popular search engines, including AltaVista, Netscape and MSN, were named in the complaint, Commercial Alert noted that not all search engine companies have adopted deceptive advertising practices. Google, which was recently nominated for a "best practices" Webby Internet award, was singled out.

"From the very beginning, our founders saw searches as a very important activity for Web users," Google spokeswoman Cindy McCaffrey told NewsFactor.

"We've focused on providing the most relevant search results based on a mathematical algorithm. And we've felt that paid inclusion or paid placement would adversely influence those results and people wouldn't get the results they were seeking."

Price of Paid Placement

Ruskin said Commercial Alert hopes the FTC will require search engines to prominently and clearly indicate what is or is not an advertisement on the results page, but does not expect action to be fast.

However, he said, backlash from the American public may cost search engines and other companies that employ the targeted practices.

"What we hope happens is the FTC requires [search engines] to disclose when ads are ads," he said. "When the public learns that the results are skewed, they will drift to other search engines that do have editorial integrity."