Bing To Warn Searchers Of Fake Online Pharmacies

Bing promises to warn searchers of fake and potentially harmful online pharmacy websites by teaming up with the FDA.

Chat with SearchBot

bing-health1-ss-1920

Bing announced on the Bing Search blog that they will be pushing out a new warning to searchers that inform them if they are about to land on a fake pharmacy website.

This warning will appear if a Bing searcher clicks on a pharmaceutical site that has been cited by the FDA as a fake online pharmacy engaged in illegal activity, Bing explained. Illegal activity can mean offering potentially dangerous, unapproved and misbranded prescription drugs to US consumers and more. Bing will use the FDA’s public list of these fake pharmacy web sites to maintain their warning list.

Here is a picture of the warning:

bing-fda-warning_pic

Bing added:

The list of online pharmaceutical sites for which we are providing warnings will grow and evolve. We will continue to refine our efforts in this area and look for more opportunities to help our users make more well-informed decisions as additional, highly-reliable sources of information become available to us.

If you think your pharmacy Web site was wrongly classified, you will have to take it up with the FDA’s Internet Pharmacy Task Force, but if the label shows for your site, and you are not on the FDA’s list, then you can contact Bing to correct it.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.