It is a fact of life that search engines are now turned to for all the latest and breaking news around the globe.  Traditional news agencies have realised that when a major story breaks they must be seen or they will lose a lot of readers to their competitors.  When news breaks, people start searching for the latest and these traditional news agencies rely heavily on search engine visibility, they simply cannot afford to be down the bottom of the page.

To combat this challenge, large news agencies are now bidding on “tragic” keywords.  For example, during the Virginia Tech massacre an AP writer found several large media outlets in a bidding war for the words “Virginia Tech shooting” and “Virginia shooting”, so as not to miss out on readers.  The large Media giants have woken up and realised that they cannot trust that people will simply turn to their paper or magazine for more information, they must be seen in the search engines.

Should these organisations be able to bid on such tragic events?  Does it cross the boundaries of ethical behaviour?  Well let’s look at the facts.  PPC (pay per click) is the most effective form of online marketing when it a message needs to be conveyed almost instantly.  It takes news sources such as Google news to reach critical mass of citations before the story starts to appear at the top of the news headlines.  Algorithmic changes usually take longer, usually up to an hour or so before the results reflect the breaking story.  It’s within this timeframe that news agencies have the opportunity to spread the word. 

So whether it’s a light hearted story or a major catastrophic event, people turn to the search engines for the latest news, and in the world we live in people want it now.  I think that the thought of these corporations bidding on such tragic keywords is what starts to make us wonder about the ethics, but news is news, happy or sad, people just want to know.