Baidu has recently come to terms with media criticisms over whether Baidu allows its paid results to influence what happens in the organic results. The Wall Street Journal’s China Journal covers this in a little bit of detail noting about Baidu’s paid results response:

Last night, in a conference call with analysts, Baidu unveiled its response: A new system that more clearly separates its paid links from ordinary search results.

“We are doing this because we care. It is important to us. We want to be a responsible corporate citizen,” said Baidu chief executive Robin Li.

They asserted again that the search company doesn’t exclude Web sites from search results because the companies behind them failed to pay for links. But Baidu executives also said they are speeding up development of the new system, called Phoenix Nest, in part to quell confusion. Under Phoenix Nest, paid ads will appear in a clearly marked section on the right side of the search results page.

Baidu has long argued that its paid links are marked, but yesterday CEO Robin Li said, “We do hear from the press from time to time that some of our users were confused by paid and non-paid content.”

This is nothing new for what search engines have had to deal with as even Google has been accussed in the past for possible monetizing their own organic results based off of their paid results as well or not adequately separating their paid/organic results.

Oftentimes those of us in the online advertising industry take for granted that what we understand about search the average Internet user does as well. In fact, most Internet users do not know all of the paid areas of the search results. Let us take an example of someone interested in looking for “gaming computers:”

You would likely get most people able to answer that there are at least one are of the above results being paid search, but that will hinge on whether the browser’s monitor coloring can differentiate the off-color yellow.

Fewer would realize the results on the right are paid, even with the sponsored links showing up. It is not the fault of a user being an idiot, just that the user does not look for the phrase “Sponsored” as a way to tell what is organic or what is paid. This is entirely different from when you use another color to separate the results as Internet users have gotten used to seeing ads in boxes that are of a different color.

Lastly, I would be surprised if many would name the shopping results as a paid search function from Google Base. These results are certainly not a part of organic search (you can argue if it is a part of paid) even though they will vary in positioning (top, bottom, middle, etc).

The point of all this is to note for the Chinese media with knowledge of the online marketing world, that even in the US for Google, most people still do not know the difference between paid and organic results. The search engines are naturally going to muddy the waters in order to get more people to click on the paid results, so without specifically noting what should be done for all engines, there is little point to complain about the current layout.