SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Online search engines are built to find information in seconds. But most leading sites appear to be taking their time meeting a federal request for more transparency on how money influences their display of search results.

In late June, the Federal Trade Commission said most of the Web's largest search engines don't reveal enough about the deals that increasingly give advertisers preferred treatment.

The FTC delivered its findings as a recommendation but indicated it could pursue legal action if the search engines don't build "clear and conspicuous" distinctions between fee-based results and those produced by objective formulas.

To gauge the search engines' response, The Associated Press reviewed a dozen sites this week: Alltheweb, AOL, AltaVista, AskJeeves, Google, Hotbot, Looksmart, Lycos, MSN, Overture, Netscape and Yahoo!. (AOL Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.com and Netscape.)

The spot checks found few changes had been made. Google was the only one that appeared to meet all the criteria laid out by regulators.

That's probably no surprise to Google's regular users. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have fiercely protected Google's editorial integrity, most notably by isolating ad-driven results under the heading "sponsored links" in shaded boxes.

AltaVista changed the way it listed its ad-driven results the day after the AP asked why the Palo Alto-based company hadn't adopted one of the FTC's simplest recommendations. Paid placements previously listed under "products and services" began showing up Thursday under AltaVista's "sponsored matches" heading.

The FTC's concerns are focused on two areas.

The first is paid placements, in which search result rankings are determined primarily by how much money advertisers are willing to pay to be listed under specific search terms. These listings typically are placed above search results generated using mathematical formulas that rank Web sites based on their relevance to the request.

The FTC recommends that paid placements be shown in separate areas on the page, labeled "sponsored search listings."

Commercial Alert

Most of the engines began to adopt language along these lines after the July 2001 complaint from a Ralph Nader-backed consumer watchdog group, Commercial Alert, that triggered the FTC's inquiry.

In its advisory, the FTC applauded these changes but said some search engines still "may not be sufficiently clear" about their paid placements.

The FTC asked search engines to disclose more on "paid inclusion programs" -- a technique has a more subtle effect on search results.

To keep their information databases fresh, search engines regularly review the content on Web sites, typically by sending out automated "spiders" that crawl much of the Internet every few weeks.

Under paid inclusion programs, Web sites pay the search engines to visit them more frequently and dig deeper into their content.

Although many search engines contend paid inclusion only has a minor impact on how results are sorted, the FTC concluded that the programs could distort rankings. The FTC thus asked the search engines to provide an easily located explanation about paid inclusion and its potential impact.

Changes ahead?

It appears all the engines except Google still need to make this change. It's not an issue for Google because its database does not include entries from paid inclusion programs.

If the search engines don't make changes on their own, federal regulators almost certainly will take harsher action, said Danny Sullivan, an industry analyst for Searchenginewatch.com.

"I don't think the search engines can afford to take a 'head in the sand' approach on this," he said.

A national Consumers Union poll of 1,500 adult Internet users taken during December and January found that 30 percent would be less likely to use search engines where advertising influences the results. Another 56 percent said advertising's influence doesn't matter to them.

Most of those surveyed -- 60 percent -- weren't even aware search engines received money to list some sites more prominently, an increasingly common practice.

If the search engines haven't complied by September, Commercial Alert said it would probably will file another complaint.

"It's important for people to know whether or not their search results are being bought by big business," said Gary Ruskin, the group's executive director.