Search results, ad links blur

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NEW YORK (AP) -- Only one in six users of Internet search engines can tell the difference between unbiased search results and paid advertisements, a survey finds.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project reported yesterday that adults online in the United States are generally naive when it comes to how search engines work.

The major search engines all return a mix of regular results, based solely on relevance to the search terms entered, and sponsored links, for which a Web site has paid money to get displayed more prominently.

Google Inc. marks such ads as "sponsored links," Yahoo Inc. terms them "sponsor results" and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN calls them "sponsored sites." Such ads are placed to the right and on top of the regular search results, in some cases highlighted in a different color.

But only 38 percent of Web searchers even know of the distinction, and of those, not even half -- 47 percent -- say they can always tell which are paid advertisements. That comes out to only 18 percent of all Web searchers knowing when a link is paid to appear.

Fewer than half of Web searchers surveyed -- 45 percent -- say they would stop using search engines if they thought the sites weren't being clear about such payments, yet 92 percent of Web searchers say they are confident about their searching abilities.

Deborah Fallows, a senior research fellow at Pew and the study's author, said the findings were surprising given that the same people are likely to know the difference between television programs and infomercials.

"We're still in the infancy of the Internet," Miss Fallows said. "People are still kind of so pleased that they can go there, ask for something and get an answer that it's kind of not on their radar screen to look in a very scrutinizing way to see what's in the background there."

She said the results reflect blind trust on the part of the Web searcher rather than "anything nefarious on the part of the search engine."