Where's the Ad? Half of Us Can't Tell

As I mention in class, the ads that Google and others run in their search engine results are often not obviously different from the natural (or "organic") search results themselves. Apparently, the FTC agrees and this week told search engine companies that they need to do a better job of identifying advertisements. I guess that barely visible light yellow background for Google's pay per click ads isn't doing the trick; a study by SEOBook found that almost half of searchers didn't recognize the difference. Full story at the New York Times.