I've used InfoChoice in the past to assist me in choosing finance products, as they have a straightforward layout and seem to be customer focused. However, despite appearing as useful as before, the sullying effects of advertising have taken their toll on the worthiness of the site.
InfoChoice provide comparison tables of various types of financial products, such as credit cards, mortgages and savings accounts. When I checked the highest performing savings accounts I was surprised to not find my current account listed amongst the leaders, as it should have been when ordered by the column I specified. It was only then that I spotted the "Show sponsored listings first?" checkbox at the top. Unticking this finally ordered the items correctly, and showed that my bank hadn't paid money to InfoChoice to be listed first by default.
The use of "sponsored listings" within InfoChoice's tables have greatly devalued them. They are quite distinct from Google use of sponsored links within their search results in two important ways:
Firstly, Google's links are always clearly differentiated, either by colour or by being in a separate column. InfoChoice has small grey sideways "Sponsored" text to the left of each relevant item, which is easily overlooked, and the meaning of which is not immediately obvious.
Secondly, Google's links are expected to be subjective, so the given order of results is not something that could be deduced in advance by a user. In contrast, the whole point of InfoChoice's listings is that they are objective. The user has chosen which column to order the results by, and the willful disregarding of this is completely contrary to user expectations. It was only because the results I received were not what I thought I should have got that I looked closer.
Now that I know about the use of Sponsored Listings by InfoChoice I will continue to use the site, but with the knowledge to make it work for me. However, I believe that they should modify their use of advertising to make it clearer to the user what is happening. I also think that explicit column sorting chosen by the user should override the sponsored listings coming first.