I am doing some research with a major Internet marketing firm aimed at comparing the relevance of organic to sponsored links. Basically, it appears that the relevance may be the same (i.e., they both address the searcher’s information need in a satisfactory manner). If this is true, sponsored links have done in 5 years what took algorithmic research to do in 50 years.

And, if true, does the searcher really care how the links are classified? As you point out, it may have a detrimental effect.

I have some survey data that shows searchers really don’t care to know (although, some surveys do show otherwise).

So I guess there are two choices. From a purely technical point of view, removing any indication that a link is sponsored may give consumers more choices. Of course, most search engines already return millions of hits so I am not sure how many more we need.

On the other hand, we can listen to what consumers want, which is to know which ones are which. While this may not be a great help in filtering relevant from irrelevant results, it doesn’t hurt either. If the content of a sponsored link is truly relevant, it will be listed high on the organic list too.

However, another question is whether we should leave this to the market to decide, or ask the FTC to step in. For engineers (like me), this decision is based on how much sense we attribute to the average consumer. For philosphers, it may depend on where you fall on the libertarian/paternalist scale.