Time to end pay-for-placing searches

THE CHINESE INTERNET COMPANY BAIDU has once again come under fire for its search engine listings, this time for promoting unofficial online visa agencies. ThePaper.cn comments:

Yan Feng, a professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, claimed that when searching “Turkish visa” on Baidu, the first two search results led to the website of a company offering e-visa services. The cost of getting a visa via the agency was double that of Turkey’s official e-visa website.

The same thing happens when a search is done for Italian or Spanish visas. Sometimes there are so many advertisements in the search results that the first page is full of them and one has to click “next page” in order to reach the official website of the country one wants a visa for.

Baidu claims that the visa agencies websites are marked as advertisements to avoid confusion. But this is a small disclaimer that can easily be missed.

Such ad rankings help to generate revenue for Baidu as it charges for the listings.

But this practice can have serious consequences. In 2016, Baidu was heavily criticized after its search results led 20-year-old Wei Zexi to an unqualified hospital that cheated him out of all his money with unnecessary and ineffective treatment for a fatal disease.

Two years later, Baidu has still not corrected its wrongdoing. Even though the Advertisement Law clearly forbids search engines ranking search results according to the amount of money paid by the listers.

The reason is obvious: The penalties for Baidu’s illegal deeds are too light to persuade it to stop the practice.

Each time it receives a mild fine, which it can easily cover by simply selling more listings.

And the problem involves not just Baidu but the whole domestic online search industry, with other search engines similarly selling their search ranking results.

It is time to put an end to the pay-for-placing practice.