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Webhost Sues Google
TheOcho writes "Webhost company AIT has decided to file a class action lawsuit against the internet giant Google. According to the article the dispute is over click fraud. AIT claims they have lost around $500,000 due to fraudulent clicks. They claim that Google is hitting their website from 'the same IP addresses'."
Isn't this their own fault if they neglect to add a rel=nofollow? Besides, the advertising agreement ought to exclude known crawler IPs like google,yahoo etc.
But suddendly, if money is involed, all this suit wearing managers start to say stuff like somebody has to do something. It seems to be true that they have been tricked. Even that it is indeed a problem of Google.
But only they can do a grep/sql statement on their little databases that stores all the cookie-ip-requests log data.
... again. The fraudulent clicks are not beeing made from a Google IP according to TFA:
Briggs said AIT is able to see where each of its advertising clicks are coming from, and in-house reports showing clicks from the same IP addresses indicate they are fraudulent.
Later on the guy seems not to see any IPs though:
"My question to them is simple," Briggs said. "Don't you think you have a right to see which IP addresses you were charged for?"
I'm sure with some serious tracking scripts any Adwords buyer should be able to monitor the IP addresses on a given keyword.
Is it just me, or does their case seem a little weak?
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Quote from TFA:
"It's wrong, and stealing and lying are wrong," AIT President Clarence Briggs said. "Somebody needs to do something about it."
And a quick search finds this page: http://advocate.soundtrax.net/ait-suit.asp, a class action against AIT for, and I double-quote, "Stealing People's Money".
Hmm!
Here is a press release from AIT. My favorite bit?
"The real threat here is to the concept of paid search and ultimately to the entire Internet," said Briggs. "If people lose confidence in the commercial viability of the Internet it threatens the very idea of an emerging global, digital economy. Sooner or later, if something isn't done, the second Internet bubble will burst."
You say "internet bubble-burst", I hear "cheap Ducatis and Aeron chairs on craigslist".
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
...Albiet on a much, much smaller scale. A bot (seemingly) made a huge amount of click-throughs within an hour (whether this was malicious or not, I have no clue), about 100x more click-throughs than normal. When I pointed this out to Google's customer support, I was shot back an email which in effect said, "We have safe-guards in place, those clicks are real." I was pretty bummed that the "do no evil" company would fire off an email like that, without at least investigating. Luckily, when I requested that they take a closer look, and that they compare what happened within that hour with my normal traffic, they agreed to investigate. In the end, I was never charged.
Google DID the right thing for me; but I really was at the mercy of Google. I really can't see why a paying customer shouldn't be seeing exactly what he's being charged for.
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If these guys have the single IP in their logs, perhaps they be looking to see who it is and sue them instead of google.
- The page has a a commercial for AIT Inc.'s "Voice, Training, and Data Services for the Office: + 20%.
- The article about AIT suing Google is immediately followed by another one promoting AIT new storefront launch in Chicago. + 35%
- Firefox says that 2 Pop-ups were blocked. I shudder to think of the content of these pop-ups: + 15 %.
-"It's wrong, and stealing and lying are wrong," AIT President Clarence Briggs said. "Somebody needs to do something about it." OMG Somebody think of the children! : + 20 %.
- The article is carried by The Fayetteville (NC) Observer. Any search on Google for AIT, Google, and lawsuit yield nothing: + 40%.
- Interestingly, though, searching for the same keywords on Yahoo does yield a few hits. : - 10 %.
Yep, this is definitely a publicity stunt by a random company trying to capitalize on Google's high profile. The numbers don't lie :)
I've heard of competitors attempting to harm another by deploying some method of abuse against their advertising costs. This would not be dissimilar to exploiting a 1-800 phone number by attempting to inflict cost damages against the target.
The article doesn't indicate any belief that Google is directly responsible for the abuse they believe is occuring though it doesn't indicate that it believes otherwise either. However, I did not read where the possibility that competitors or other malicious parties are directly responsible for the act.
If they believe that Google should be responsible for not preventing an act, then I think it's a case that should be judged on whether or not Google should be responsible for filtering fraudulent calls to their site as channeled through Google advertising. To make the parallel to toll-free phone service once more, I am unfamiliar with any such protection offered by a phone service provider.
Should Google do their best to determine and filter against abusive "clicking"? Yes, if they want their advertising to be valued. Are they or have they been doing their best? That is a question for the courts to decide I suppose. But in my view, unless Google is being directly charged with responsibility for performing these clicks, then I think it will be a tough case to prove.
I looked at my website's logs for that day and found over 50 instances of a request for "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" from a single IP address. What made this even more suspicious was the fact that they were all made with "Wget/1.10", and that IP never requested any other page from my site, not even the image/CSS files used on the main page.
I contacted Google's AdWord support, documenting all of the above in great detail and saying that these seem like fraudulent clicks. I got back a canned response "We're looking into it". Two weeks go by, nothing happens. I contact them again, asking for a progress update. I get back a response "Your case will be investigated within the next week". I wait 1.5 weeks, contact them again, ask what the hell is taking them so long.
I get back another response, again promising swift resolution. Couple of days later, I get an email from an Indian employee of Google saying that they have not detected any fraudulent clicks. I ask for a breakdown of charges per IP address for the day to check their data, but they say they can not provide those.
I tell them very well, I have no choice but to shut down all of my Google advertising.
Personally, I wouldn't trust Google's AdWords at all. I'm sure it makes money for some advertisers, but expecting Google to side on the side of advertisers in disputes is overoptimistic. They lose money on that, and as the case is that all the evidence is in their possession, and they refuse to show it to outsiders, how the hell are you supposed to prove that clicks are fraudulent if Google disagrees with you, as they seem to do in even obvious cases?
Why can't they track the referrals themselves? When creating Adwords, you input two URLs: one that's show in the bottom of the ad, and one that the clicker is actually sent to. You set the first parameter to http://www.fuzzybritchesbandit.com/ and the second to http://www.fuzzybritchesbandit.com?campaign=adword s. You then compare your HTTP logs against Google's clickthrough reports.
This would ensure that you aren't getting charged for clicks where there are none. But there's also the possiblity that some sort of script *is* clicking just to drive your bill up. Now if this company has paid Google a half million dollars, they should have some pretty substantinal visitor data to mine. They should know what the typical visitor does once they arrive, e.g. the mean time spent on the site is 8.5 minutes, they're 76% likely to click on the features page first and then page second. Sooo... If they getting a bunch of clickthroughs from the same IP and the path/time through the site for each session is either a) identicial to the other sessions from that IP (a stupid bot that takes the same path everytime) or b) dramatically varies from the metrics of typical visitor (a semi-stupid bot that randomly traverses the site), then you know something is bunk.
Like others have said, just saying "we have a lot of people from the same IP address" isn't good enough to pursue a claim of fraud. You'd think a webhost with a half-million dollar advertising budget would have the technicial staff who could tell them the same thing.
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Good high paying jobs? I worked there as an admin. On adverage the average admin salery was 28k
/. as good press, I am glad to see the customers coming to speak out tho.
The average tech pay was around 22k
They raise their "average" pay per employee by giving raises to the officers
As for number of domains hosted, they do not meet the number listed, just like in the early days they did not have an actual "OC-192", they just had the equivilant over multiple pipes.
You have to watch out for posts like this, at AITsucks.com the press boys at AIT like to come and anonymously say crap like this.
AIT has in the past decided to lock their current month to month customers in a 6 month reacurring contract, wanna know how they let them know? they barried it in a Christmas new letter, then wondered why after the first 6 months so many customers wanted to cancel and blamed it on everything but that. Something of that coincidence on that magnitude just does not happen.
Also as stated Fayetteville does have a vested interest in AIT, but what this poster failes to mention is all the times fayetteville has threatened to take the building away from AIT that they basicly gave them for failing to meet the conditions in which it was given.
AIT sees
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Actually it is more insidious than that.
Google 'india job clicking ads' and you get over half a million hits, a great many of them describing in detail a digital evolution of the sweatshops from the turn of the last century, but instead of making clothing they are sitting there clicking on Google ads. A whole army of clickers, their only job being to drive click-through ad revenue for web-sites made specifically to drive this revenue.
Sure would suck to be some company in the US (such as AIT) that made a good-faith business deal with Google only to have half a million dollars sucked out of your company by an army of parasites. I'm not saying it is Google's fault, but I can see where it would be in Google's best interest to tweak their paradigm to prevent it from happening.
Whatever you measure, that is what changes (improves, hopefully.)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer