In a closely watched move, Snap has unveiled its pay-to-play search.The Associated Press report sums up the move for consumers: “Snap will lump together search results financed by advertisers in the same column as Web links drawn from algorithms programmed to disregard financial incentives and find the most relevant response to a user’s request.” The Merc reports that marketers are drooling at the idea, from the entrepreneur who first showed Google how to spin cyberspace searches into real-world gold, Bill Gross. It “sounds like a dream come true,” said Jinenne Sutherland, a manager at Organic. That’s because the $16 billion market for online advertising has a secret. The small text-based ads that made Google a Wall Street superstar do not seem to be working as well as they used to.Gross said he thinks his new company can be as powerful an idea.With Snap, advertisers decide how much they are willing to pay if a customer completes a certain action — like buying a product or filling out a form. Advertisers submit their bids and create a keyword campaign.If a Snap user visits an advertiser’s site and completes the desired action, the advertiser pays Snap. Otherwise, the only cost is a $50 non-refundable sign-up deposit. “For the advertiser, it’s the ultimate,” said Snap Chief Executive Tom McGovern. “They only pay when they ring the register.”The AP report said:Snap originally intended to place a light gray “sponsored result” disclaimer next to the Web addresses of all the ads that crop up. Just hours before the new site’s debut, Snap decided to make the disclaimers even more prominent by changing the coloring to bright orange and increasing the size of the type. The light gray label wasn’t prominent enough to satisfy Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a Ralph Nader-based watchdog group behind a 2001 complaint that prompted the FTC to issue its search engine advertising guidelines.I think the whole online advertising market’s click-centrism is leading to more than blurred lines in advertising. Web site that make editorial decisions obsessed with clicks are getting downright blurry editorially. CNET’s News.com, which used to be pretty tight and reliable, has become one I can’t grasp. Sure there is not as much tech news compared to the late 1990s, but general science stories such as global warming on an IT Web site? And how many fluffy blog posts can we handle? The job of responsible journalism is to filter all the garbage to present news that matters. Now that News.com has dropped its “News of change” branding does that mean we’ll get even more from anything under the sun with the hope of clicks.The big question is this: Why are online publishers being held to a different standard than print media? You can’t click on a page of printed paper, but a full-page ad may affect your purchasing decisions. Same goes online for me. I hardly ever click other than by mistake. But I do remember ads and brands and associate them with Web sites. And how does a click differentiate between a CEO and a teenager? That question highlights how the current ad thinking hasn’t even evolved to modern publishing practices. Magazines, which are getting ever more vertical, simply cannot work under this model with becoming blurry.Talk back to us on the big blur — ads and editorial — below. Technology Industry