Time to end pay-for-placing searches

THE CHINESE INTERNET COMPANY BAIDU has once again come under fire for its search engine listings, this time for promoting unofficial online visa agencies. ThePaper.cn comments:

Yan Feng, a professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, claimed that when searching "Turkish visa" on Baidu, the first two search results led to the website of a company offering e-visa services. The cost of getting a visa via the agency was double that of Turkey's official e-visa website.

The same thing happens when a search is done for Italian or Spanish visas. Sometimes there are so many advertisements in the search results that the first page is full of them and one has to click "next page" in order to reach the official website of the country one wants a visa for.