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How Google Manages Click Fraud

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the making-advertisers-warm-and-happy dept.

Finin writes "In February 2005, Google was sued by Lane's Gifts & Collectibles in a class-action lawsuit over click fraud. The company alleged that Google had been improperly billing for pay-per-click ads that were not viewed by legitimate potential customers. As part of a settlement earlier this year, Google agreed to have an independent expert examine their click fraud detection methods, policies, and procedures and make a determination of whether or not they were reasonable measures to protect advertisers. The report of the expert, NYU Information Systems Professor Alexander Tuzhilin (a Professor of Information Systems at NYU), is now available." Update 07/26/2006 at 12:52 GMT by SM: Fixed the link to Tuzhilin's report.

3 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. There is a report... That was the wrong pdf by technoextreme · · Score: 1, Redundant

    http://googleblog.blogspot.com/pdf/Tuzhilin_Report .pdf This actually has a lot more meat and information since this is the actual report.

    --
    Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
  2. Re:Enron by andrewman327 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Google isn't evil. I also doubt that most clicks are clickfraud. I do admit to clicking on a banner ad when I find a website that I really like, but only if it interests me on some level.

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    Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
  3. Re:Google Screws p2pnet.net out of its Share by Onan · · Score: 0, Redundant
    I am a Geek who used to love using Google, but now that Google has become big, it is doing what most other big companies do - screw the small guy and just walk away.

    Well, this isn't exactly a case of Google maliciously screwing the small guy. In fact, this is Google needing to make a choice between two small guys: the ad-displaying site, and the advertisers. Even if Google was incorrect about whether or not this was fraud, this was still them going out of their way to not charge their advertisers for valueles clicks.

    If Google were just being blindly greedy, they would allow fraudulent clicks to pass freely, as they're just more clicks for which they can bill advertisers. But they instead chose to at least attempt to treat everyone fairly, even though it cost them money in the short term.

    I'm sorry that this site was denied this source of revenue, and it's unfortunate that the fraud-hunting system misfired in this way. But it's a bit deceptive to characterize that as malice or greed on Google's part.