Opinion: It turns out that sponsored links often point to dirty sites. Shouldn't search engines take some responsibility for them?Call me naive. I was surprised to read that sponsored links on search engines are far more likely than conventional "organic" links to lead to hostile sites.
The study, by researcher and activist Ben Edelman and the McAfee SiteAdvisor team, found that 8.5 percent overall of sponsored links on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN, AOL and Ask.com point to sites rated as "risky" by SiteAdvisor.
Specifically, these risky sites merit either red or yellow status by SiteAdvisor, and it's worth repeating the exact definitions:
- "Red" rated sites failed SiteAdvisor's safety tests. Examples are sites that distribute adware, send a high volume of spam or make unauthorized changes to a user's computer.
- "Yellow" rated sites engage in practices that warrant important advisory information based on SiteAdvisor's safety tests. Examples are sites that send a high volume of "non-spammy" e-mail, display many pop-up ads or prompt a user to change browser settings.
My first inclination was to ask whether the SiteAdvisor ratings of the 8.5 percent as risky was trustworthy, but I've dealt with Ben Edelman enough to trust his judgment on it. The guy's not perfect, but he's scrupulous. Plus their methodology is all there in the article and seems, at first glance, to be reasonable. Add to that the fact that, as far as I can tell, the search companies haven't disputed his results, and it's pretty easy to draw conclusions.
I don't usually pay much attention to the sponsored links. I tune them out. But they're there for a reason. Somebody's clicking them, and those users are not generally expecting a scam or to be infected with malware. Note that the study showed that 6.5 percent of the risky 8.5 percent were rated red, making them genuine bad guys, not just arguably aggressive marketers.
The whole click-based economy seems strange and illogical to me, and this sort of bizarre situation is one of the results: scammers and purveyors of malicious code advertising in supposedly legitimate venues. Nobody taking responsibility. This isn't right.
According to the study, "Users can't count on search engines to protect them; to the contrary, we find that search result rankings often do not reflect site safety." I don't think this is an acceptable situation.
The way I see it, there's a difference here between sponsored and organic links. Engines should do what they can for organic links. It would be good and probably to their competitive advantage to provide some warning about trustworthiness of a target. But engines don't get paid for that, and there's a tradition that they should be neutral in a sense when generating these results.
With sponsored links, as far as I'm concerned, the search engine is implicitly endorsing the target of the link. They took money to put it up there, and that makes an important difference. It's disingenuous for them to disclaim any responsibility if a user follows one of these links and incurs damage as a result.
Perhaps our standards for what we see on the Internet have dropped to the point where nothing's really wrong anymore. It's not hard to find spam-quality sponsored links. Do searches for "arthritis medicine" and "erectile dysfunction" and look at the sponsored ads.
The "erectile dysfunction" search on Google is especially illuminating: The first page of organic links is entirely made up of legitimate medical sites: the NIH, the Mayo Clinic and legitimate pharmaceuticals. I won't repeat the sponsored links, but they look like stuff you'd read on the walls of a high school boys room.
MSN's and Yahoo's results are no better. Ask.com, which had the worst overall performance in the study, had more respectable results in my queries. But why should a query for "American Idol" generate this sponsored result: "Disguise Your Caller ID—Change Your Caller ID At Will! Works From Any Phone"? Mind you, I haven't even tested for malware at the target sites, just looked for obviously phony and offensive material.
Click here to read more about SiteAdvisor.
Forget for the moment my argument that sponsored links amount to an endorsement and think of them as what they obviously are: advertising. If you went to a store after reading its ad in the local newspaper and the store robbed you once you got there, wouldn't you expect the newspaper to do something about it? Don't most newspapers have policies about running ads with actual offensive material in them? It's not like they're responsible for a robbery, but if they ignore warning and continue to run the ads, then they are complicit.
The SiteAdvisor/Edelman report is such a warning. Who knows how many users are willing to click on a link that brings adware to their system because Yahoo or Google or MSN listed it? It's going to mean forgoing advertising revenue, so I don't expect them to, but the search engine companies need to start paying attention to whose money they take.
Security Center Editor Larry Seltzer has worked in and written about the computer industry since 1983.
