Are Search Engines Promoting Illegal Drugs?
August 28th, 2009 | Author: rshipley
Both Yahoo and Microsoft search engines advertise illegal medications, according to a study conducted by two independent research firms.
The study by LegitScript and KnujOn found that 80% of the sponsored pharmaceutical ads in Yahoo and Bing search results sold prescription drugs without a valid prescription. In some cases, the drugs were imported from India, which is a violation of U.S. law.
This even violates Yahoo’s own policy, which requires all Internet pharmacy advertisers to be based in the U.S. or Canada. But some Canadian advertisers that were approved by Yahoo imported the drugs from India, Singapore or Barbados.
In one case, a researcher ordered a drug without a prescription from a pharmacy advertised in Bing search results and received a counterfeit version of the drug.
The researchers also found that Microsoft was slow to respond to these violations of U.S. law. Shortly after the company vowed to take “immediate action … to remove any policy violators,” a researcher was able to buy a drug that is a controlled substance in some U.S. states from a Bing advertiser without a prescription.
KnujOn found that searchers who clicked an online pharmacy ad that appeared legitimate were sometimes redirected to an illegal Internet pharmacy.
“If the search engines continue to knowingly facilitate illegal prescription drug sales, then we’ll continue to issue these reports,” said KnujOn president Garth Bruen.
According to LegitScript’s web site, 98% of the online pharmacies in their database do not meet their standards for an Internet pharmacy (http://www.legitscript.com/standards). That’s 44,293 online pharmacies!
So before you order prescription drugs on the Internet, visit http://www.legitscript.com, enter the URL of the online pharmacy and click Validate. The company has 268 valid online pharmacies in its database, and 780 more are awaiting approval.
Sources:
http://www.pharmatimes.com/WorldNews/article.aspx?id=16473
http://www.legitscript.com
http://www.knujon.com/news.html
Posted in 
Tags:
Hi … I found this website by mistake. I was searching in Yahoo for Accounting software that I had already purchased when I found your site, I have to say your page is pretty informative, I just love the theme, its amazing!. I don’t have the time today to fully read your entire site but I have bookmarked it and also will sign up for your RSS feed. I’ll back around in a day or two. Thanks again for a great site.
Hello Alvaro!
You were searching for accounting software and you found my site? This is a perfect example of how you can search the Internet and pull up the strangest things!
That’s exactly why I started my business as an independent researcher. I knew a lot of people were searching the Internet and getting the weirdest things. Spending hours opening links to see if that page contains the information you want. As a former reference librarian, I thought I might be able to find exactly what they’re looking for a lot faster.
No disrespect intended, and I don’t mean to insult anyone’s search skills. But it’s an information jungle out there, and many people might need an experienced guide to help them find what they’re looking for relatively quickly. Yes, the Internet is “free”, but isn’t your time worth money?
Your experience is a perfect example. If you stumbled onto my site because you were looking for accounting software, how good is Yahoo’s search engine? This post DOES mention Yahoo, and I guess it MIGHT contain the words “accounting” and “software.” I’ll have to look at it again.
But did you find information about accounting software on my web site? NO!
This is an example of what librarians call a “false drop.” It may contain all of the keywords you searched, but are they in the right context?
This is what you get when a computer collects and indexes web sites rather than a human being. The computer software crawls the Internet, goes through every web page it finds, and identifies all of the important words on that page. It copies the words and puts them into a giant index. Just like the index at the end of a book.
So when you search the Internet, you’re actually searching the search engine’s index, NOT the Internet. Like finding information in a book by looking in the index. How else can you get “23,846 pages in 0.67 seconds”? See my page “The Internet” for more information about this.
So the software pulls up all the pages that contain your keywords. And the software decides what the most “relevant” hits are, and puts them at the top of the first page of search engine results. Are you happy with its choices? Did you ever find the accounting software information you were looking for?
Thank you for your comment.
Ruth M. Shipley, MS, MLIS
SMR Information Solutions
Pretty good post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed reading your blog posts. Any way I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you post again soon.
Thank you for your comments.
I’m a former reference librarian who is now an independent researcher and writer. But unlike librarians, I research business information for companies for a fee. I specialize in searching premier databases of information that are NOT on the Internet and are NOT free.
So I hope to start blogging soon about news in the information industry. You may or may not find it interesting!
Ruth M. Shipley
You made some Good points there. I did a search on the topic and found most people will agree.
Hey, this is my first visit to your blog… We are a group of volunteers and starting a new initiative in a community in the same niche. Your blog provided us valuable information to work on. good job
Thanx for the effort, keep up the good work Great work, I am going to start a small Blog Engine course work using your site I hope you enjoy blogging with the popular BlogEngine.net.Thethoughts you express are really awesome. Hope you will right some more posts.
That is nice to definitely find a site where the blogger knows what they are talking about.
Great article. There’s a lot of good data here, though I did want to let you know something – I am running Ubuntu with the up-to-date beta of Firefox, and the layout of your blog is kind of quirky for me. I can understand the articles, but the navigation doesn’t function so well.
Hello!
I’m sorry, but I have no idea what Ubuntu is. From the context of your sentence, I’m guessing it’s some kind of new OS.
I use Firefox v. 3.6 on MS Windows and my website looks and acts fine. So it’s probably your OS that’s messing it up.
Not much I can do about that, I’m sorry.
Ruth M. Shipley
It was a really nice thought! Just wanna say thank you for the information you have apportioned. Just continue composing this kind of post. I will be your hardcore reader. Thanks once again.
I agree that drugs should not be sold online without a prescription. And I agree that the search engines should be more careful about who they allow to use their advertising space. But legitimate Canadian pharmacies should not be lumped in with rogue pharmacies. This is reckless and unethical, and it is exactly what some people do (intentionally and unintentionally).
thanks,
Heard about this site from my friend. He pointed me here and told me I’d find what I need. He was right! I got all the questions I had, answered. Didn’t even take long to find it. Love the fact that you made it so easy for people like me. More power
Hello Britt:
Thank you so much for your comment. And please thank your friend who referred you!
Ruth M. Shipley