NGOs take aim at paid web listings

Paid ads marked in US and S. Korea

Search engines in the United States, including Google and Yahoo, were asked by a government agency in 2002 to distinguish paid advertising from unpaid material voluntarily, and to explain to the public how advertising is delivered.

Some search providers chose to comply. Google, for example, began to mark the paid advertising on its platform in purple or green.

In South Korea, search engines Naver and Daum have been urged since 2013 to open to the public their approach to the ordering of returns on searches. They were also required to disclose their rules about cooperating with enterprises and highlighting paid listings.

SOURCE: BEIJING NEWS