December 2, 2003

Drugs are out and sex is in, at least when it comes to advertising on Internet search engines. Yahoo and, most recently, Google have moved to restrict advertisements from unlicensed pharmacies in an attempt to address public concerns about illegal sales of drugs online.

Those efforts to police drug advertisers, however, do not carry over to restricting sex advertisements. In fact, Yahoo and America Online have changed policies to earn more money from Internet searches related to pornography.

Over the past few months, a trade group for legitimate pharmacies has been lobbying to press the search engines to stop accepting advertising from pharmacies that do not have licenses, many of them overseas.

Last month, Overture Services, which sells advertising that appears on Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN and other search engines, stopped taking any advertising for Internet pharmacies. Overture, which was recently acquired by Yahoo, plans to start accepting ads from some online pharmacies again early next year, once it can find an outside company to certify which pharmacies are legitimate. This week, Google said it would also stop taking advertising from unlicensed pharmacies.

Google sells the advertising on the America Online search service. AOL says its policy has long banned advertisements from unlicensed pharmacies, but it says that Google has not always been able to block such ads from appearing on AOL search pages.

Google said in a statement that despite its more restrictive drug advertising policy, its main search results would continue to list all sites found in a search on a drug term, whether or not the site is a licensed pharmacy.

A Google spokesman said in an e-mail message that he was unavailable to clarify the statement further. Meanwhile, policies on sex ads are being relaxed. In October, America Online started earning money from searches for pornography on its search site. Now, a search for a sexual term on AOL returns a page noting that the search might produce adult content. This page gives the user two options. The first, presented in larger type, offers to search for the term on "Adult Search Fantasy Finder," which is described as "an independent adult search service." The second choice is to search using AOL's own search service, which is mainly provided by Google.

Both options quickly lead to hard-core pornography, but the search results provided by Google do not have advertising or otherwise produce revenue for America Online. (Google does sell ads related to sexual terms on its own site.) Adult Search Fantasy Finder, however, pays AOL to receive traffic from its search site, said Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman.

Adult Search Fantasy Finder is run by a company called Bullseye9 in Westminster, Colorado, which charges adult sites a fee to be listed. Weinstein declined to discuss the financial arrangement between AOL and Bullseye9, other than to say it represented a small percentage of AOL's search revenue. Bullseye9 executives did not return several calls seeking comment.

Gary Kremen, chief executive of Sex.com, another search site that specializes in pornography, said that advertisers typically paid about 10 cents for each user who clicked on an ad linked to their sites and that an adult search engine might pay a company like America Online two-thirds of its revenue in return for the traffic.

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