In a June 27th letter from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to “Commercial Alert”, a self-proclaimed consumer watchdog at http://www.commercialalert.org, the FTC acknowledged that there may have been inadequate notice to users of several of the major internet search engines that some placements were paid, and not necessarily based on the best matches of the information requested. The search engines cited in the original complaint by Commercial Alert, and the 11-month long FTC investigation were, AOL, Direct Hit Technologies, iWon, LookSmart, Microsoft and Terra Lycos. Traditionally, it had been believed that search engine results were based on relevance, rather than paid advertising. In the FTC letter, Heather Hippsley, Acting Associate Director, Division of Advertising Practices, said, “Because search engines historically displayed search results based on relevancy to the search query, as determined by algorithms or other objective criteria, the staff believes that consumers may reasonably expect that the search results displayed by individual search engines are ranked in accordance with this standard industry practice - that is, based on a set of impartial factors.
Thus, a departure from the standard practice, such as a search engine's insertion of paid-for placements in the search list, may need to be disclosed clearly and conspicuously to avoid the potential for deception.” In the search engines owned by the above companies, 11 of 12 search engines placed paid listings ahead of unpaid listings that may have been more relevant results. The problem is not that the search engines collected advertising revenue, because they obviously need revenue in order to continue their services, but that they may not have clearly informed the consumer that the rankings were based on payments received, rather than the relevance of the results.
The FTC letter also cited a May, 2002, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) funded survey that found that “…71% of U.K. users were unaware that some search engines let advertisers pay to get more prominent positions in search results.” In response, the BBC started its own search engine, and refuses paid listings, in order to provide results based on relevance.
If the user sees terms such as “Sponsored Links", "Sponsored Search Listings", "Recommended Sites," "Featured Listings," "Premier Listings," "Search Partners," "Start Here," "Featured Listings," "Partner Search Results," or "Spotlight," that is an indication that the listing is paid. Sadly, some search engines that solicit such payments make no indications to the user that the listings are biased based on those payments.
Some search engines not cited by the FTC, such as CNET and ZDNET, and about.com typically list the amount paid by the advertiser directly in the search engine results or in the links themselves. This is often the revenue received for a “click-through” if the user clicks on that specific link. Based on the language of the FTC letter, the FTC apparently has no complaint as long as the user is clearly made aware that the listings are paid or otherwise biased.
Search engines were not the only computer related business that may be tainted with problems. The U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released a report on June 28 (http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/n02-07.htm) that says that “Software Errors Cost U.S. Economy $59.5 Billion Annually.” The cost is about equally borne by developers and users. The report went on to state that it is virtually impossible to create totally bug-free software, considering the millions of lines of code in many modern software products, but that an estimated $22.2 billion could be saved by improved testing and earlier detection and repair of such bugs. About 80% of software development costs are currently spent on identifying and correcting bugs, but still such problems are often impossible to identify until the product is in wide use. According to the report, over half of all such bugs are not found until “downstream” in development, or by the final users. The 309-page report recommended infrastructure necessities that the NIST could utilize to help improve software testing capabilities.
NIST recommends that software developers can substantially improve their products through improved testing. Standardized testing methods can be created and used to better test software, and provide users with more accurate quality comparisons.
Software is very big business. In 2000, according to the NIST report, software sales totaled $180 billion, and employed 697,000 software engineers, and 585,000 programmers. As expensive as software already is to create, publish, and distribute, with 80% of development costs already being spent to debug the software, the marginal cost to eliminate substantially more bugs may make software so expensive that a critical part of the economy may be crippled.
Based on personal experience, as well as the many callers to my weekly radio shows, it is impossible for software developers to be able to make their products function flawlessly on the near infinite permutations of computer hardware available, as well as the myriad of software combinations that may be running on a computer at any given time. What works apparently flawlessly on my computer, may run poorly on your computer. Is this variation due to the differences in hardware and software on our machines? That is the more likely scenario than a specific program has such enormous bugs that it fails frequently.
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