Bing Warns Shoppers: Don’t Get Scroogled This Holiday Season
Microsoft launches national campaign to alert Americans to Google’s new pay-to-rank shopping search practices.
REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 28, 2012 — Bing, Microsoft Corp.’s search engine, today is launching a national campaign to highlight Bing’s commitment to honest search results and to help explain to consumers the risks of Google Shopping’s newly announced “pay-to-rank” practice, in which the shopping search results customers see are not true search results such as they see elsewhere on Google; they are actually ads that are ranked, in part, by who pays the most. More information on these practices is available at https://www.scroogled.com.
Instead of showing you the most relevant shopping search results for the latest coffee maker you’re looking to buy mom, Google’s new redesigned shopping vertical now decides what to show you — and how prominently to display what product offers they show — based partially on how much a merchant selling the product has paid Google. Merchants can literally pay to improve their chances to display their product offers higher than others inside of Google’s shopping “search,” even if it’s not necessarily better or cheaper. That’s not right, it’s not transparent, it’s not what you expect from search, and it’s not how we at Bing think search engines should help consumers get the best prices and selection when shopping. Consumers are urged to visit https://www.scroogled.com to learn more about how to avoid getting “Scroogled,” a term used by Bing to describe Google’s new practice that leaves people with fewer choices and potentially higher prices. (more…)