News, Views and a Silicon Valley Diary

News and views, culled and edited from my online column, eJournal (www.siliconvalley.com/dangillmor):

SEARCH ME, PAY ME: You may have missed it in the avalanche of news during the past several weeks, but an Oregon-based organization called Commercial Alert (www.commercialalert.org) has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the major Web search engines for "inserting advertisements in search engine results without clear and conspicuous disclosure that the ads are ads."

It's about time. As J.D. Lasica put it in a column for the Online Journalism Review (www.ojr.org), "Black is white, profit is all, and the entire Internet is filled with callow users who are either (a) so cynical that they assume all search results are bought and paid for, or (b) clueless droids who have somehow been goaded into ignoring wonderfully useful commercial listings."

Unfortunately, his take on the situation was all too correct. Such is the level of honesty, or lack thereof, in so much of American business that people do assume they're being lied to. They do assume that search results are bought and paid for. In general, they tend to assume the worst.

And, sadly, they are too often correct.

It isn't just a tech-industry problem. Look at the newspaper advertisements the airlines run. That $197 trip from Boston to San Jose looks mighty alluring, until you notice that it's "each way based on a round-trip purchase" — a classic and perpetual marketing trick of an industry that not only treats us like cattle in the air but apparently thinks we're about as bright as the average Holstein, too.

Think about it. Suppose a department store advertised shoes for, say, $45 and then noted in the fine print that the price was based on the purchase of a pair.

The tech industry adopted these techniques almost from the day it started. You still see ads for monitors that claim screen diagonals that are plainly false. You still see portable-computer makers lie about how long their machines will last on one battery charge.

Consumers are cynical? You bet. They have ample reason.

	P R E V I O U S   W E B L O G   U P D A T E S . . .
		Friday, July 27, 2001 Steve Ballmer's Hilarious Hypocrisy Thursday, July 26, 2001 The Unobtainium -- Imagining Tomorrow's Handhelds Wednesday, July 25, 2001 Open Source Maturing Monday, July 23, 2001 Adobe Does the Right Thing Sunday, July 22, 2001 In Finland, Inventing the Mobile Future Saturday, July 21, 2001 Giving Away Dot-US in an Unseemly Hurry << 30 Day Archive >>