In a move that’s costing them about $10,000 per day, BP has purchased advertised results on Google and Yahoo for when people search on the term “oil spill”. ABC News says that the company had previously spent billions on search engine optimization to get their site to appear as high up as possible in regular search results. But it’s also true that a lot of people don’t bother differentiating between legit search results and search term-based ads. As a result, people looking for information on the spill, are very likely to go to BP’s official party line response. I checked under terms like “oil spill map” and “oil spill response” and same thing happens.