Illegitimate pharmacies account for 90 percent of drug ads on Microsoft's Bing

[JBeukema]

he pharmacy ads that appear alongside search results on Microsoft's Bing are dominated by "rogue" companies, according to a report released yesterday by KnujOn, a spam-monitoring company, and LegitScript, a firm that verifies online pharmacies. The report investigates the ads that appear when a person enters search terms such as "generic meds" or "online pharmacy" into Bing. Of the 69 advertisers that the company investigated, only seven were deemed to be legitimate. The remaining 62 did not require a prescription, in violation of US law, did not have a US address or offered to ship drugs from outside of the US.

To sell ads, search engines typically run an auction for certain search keywords, with popular search terms, such as "Viagra," costing more. Every time a user clicks on a search ad, the seller pays the search engine a fee, ranging from a few cents to a few dollars, depending on the keyword. In this bidding system, Horton suggests that the abundance of illegal pharmacy ads may overwhelm legitimate ones. "If the drugs they're selling are counterfeit or knockoffs, they have lower costs than legitimate pharmacies," says Horton. "The rogue Internet pharmacies have more money to bid on advertising [and] drive up the auction rates, to the detriment of legitimate advertisers."

Technology Review: Rogue Pharmacies Dominate Bing's Ads

 

[garyd]

They also account for about 90% of my spam...

 

[anna]

Bing is run by obama and co!!

 

[Chris]

I don't want any gubbermint burrocrat coming between me and my drugs!