Bidding of Baidu has recently been bitterly condemned, especially after the death of Wei Zexi, who was cheated by an irresponsible hospital whose ads are listed on the top of the searching engine of Baidu.
The so called bidding refers to that you can pay a competitive price to make your information (most are ads) on the top of each page of the searching engine of Baidu which means if one user searches some certain information by Baidu, he isn’t provided with the most useful or popular one, but the ads.
It is innocuous to put ads winning the bidding on top if the ads’ contents don’t relate to the fatal interests of people, after all, the searching service is free and Baidu needs to make a profit. Nevertheless, some ads which affect people’s health and lives such as medical service, drugs, health food and so on shouldn’t be imposed on the users.
The evil of the bidding has been talked much, and in this article I want to say how to regulate it. It’s unwise and lazy to prohibit all forms of bidding in searching engine, we need to formulate a more sophisticated system to regulate it.
First, all the ads appeared in a searching engine should be marked. In that way, users will know what they see first are ads or useful information, that will save time of users and will lower risks of being cheated by the ads.
Second, the classification of ads is needed. Some ads like medical service and drugs, according to current regulations, need to be examined and approved before publicizing. At present, such ads, however, if they choose to appear in a searching engine, they escape from the examination. So, we must pull these ads back under examination and only if they can pass the examination, they will appear in a searching engine.
Third, the company of a searching engine, like Baidu, should take responsibility as an ads releaser, which means the company has a liability of maintaining the authenticity of ads and making compensation to the injured person if he was cheated by the ads.
Finally, we should give rewards to users who report deceptive ads to motivate the public to supervise the advertiser and releaser. The money of rewards should be paid by the advertiser and releaser of the defective ads. That will solve the problem of bureaucracy and get an effective result.
We look forward to new regulations on this matter, and hope the said advices will be useful.