Reports surfaced about yahoo, one of the biggest names in search engines, selling ad space to online pharmacies that sell drugs without a prescription. Before any website accepts advertisements to put on their site, they should know and research the company trying to get ad space to make sure nothing illegal is going on. Through information from private researchers, the ads from many online pharmacies during the late spring and early summer of 2009, were selling prescription drugs to people without a valid prescription.

Along with yahoo, the new search engine from Microsoft “Bing” has also been seen advertising for some of the same online pharmacies as yahoo. If the search engines continue to aid these illegal companies selling prescription drugs without a valid prescription, then more and more reports will surface, and the search engines could be facing even more legal issues.

Now it doesn’t mean that these search engines don’t use any protection and just sell ad space to anyone. It was reported that sites like yahoo and Google use a firm called PharmacyChecker.com to make sure that all of the companies wishing to buy ad space are not doing anything illegal. So it might not have been the search engines fault, but they can still be held accountable for adverting those illegal pharmacies.

So if search engines want to stay out of the spotlight for selling ad space to online pharmacies, they will have to come up with some other way to check if the companies are legal or not. Since their current firm to research legal pharmacies, PharmacyChecker.com has reported being able to get prescription drugs without a prescription, they should have denied those companies to search engines selling ad space. That leaves the search engines like yahoo and bing to find a new solution if they want to continue selling ad space to online pharmacies.