Consumer WebWatch: raising Web standards. (Test Inform Protect).

Relatively few health, finance, and shopping Web sites consistently disclose information such as advertising and sponsorship ties that may affect the credibility of their published material. One example: shopping sites that purport to rank products for buyers in an unbiased way, when companies actually pay for their products to be ranked.

That news, the outcome of an international investigation, is among the findings of a study by Consumers International, an advocacy group of which Consumers Union is a member, and Consumer WebWatch, www.Consumer WebWatch org CU's initiative to help improve the credibility of information on the Web.

Launched one year ago, Consumer Web Watch publishes research to highlight issues of concern among the Web's most-trafficked categories, including travel, health information, and search engines. Based on that research, it creates guidelines for Web sites such as standards for advertising disclosure. Those guidelines are used, among other things, to provide the Web site e-Ratings we publish on www.ConsumerReports.org.

Consumer WebWatch is funded by grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Open Society Institute.

Other Consumer WebWatch research has found the following:

* Only a small percentage of survey respondents who use search engines said they knew that companies often pay to have their Web pages appear in a search result. Some, such as Google, are more forthcoming about this practice of paid placement and clearly label results for which advertisers pay. Others don't.

* Consumers don't hold in high regard shopping Web sites that offer products or services for sale. Of the 1,500 adult Internet users who ...