"As part of the settlement in the click-fraud case Lane's Gifts v. Google, we agreed with the plaintiffs to have an independent expert examine our detection methods, policies, practices, and procedures and make a determination of whether or not we had implemented reasonable measures to protect all of our advertisers. The result of that is a 47-page report, written by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at NYU. The report was filed with the court in Texarkana, Arkansas, this morning," says Google's blog.
The bottom-line conclusion of the report is that Google's efforts against click fraud are in fact reasonable. At several points in his report, he calls out the quality of our inspection systems and notes their constant improvement. It is an independent report, so not surprisingly there are other aspects of it with which we don't fully agree. But overall it is a validation of what we have said for some time about our work against invalid clicks.
At Search Engine Watch, Danny Sullivan has an excellent Abridged Version that extracts the most significant quotes from the report and raises objections.
Comment: Since Google's revenues are wholly dependent on clicks, click fraud is the one thing that could sink the company -- and since every click is a matter of intent, there's ultimately no way to eliminate it completely. Google's very survival depends on it eliminating as much click-fraud as possible, and the company must be pleased by the praise Dr Tuzhilin heaped on its team. However, he also gets to the heart of Google's problem with this remark:
This conflicting dilemma between advertisers' right to know and Google's inability to provide the appropriate information to advertisers because of the security concerns is part of the Fundamental Problem of the PPC [pay per click] advertising model.
This one is not going to go away -- especially not when click-fraud becomes much more sophisticated than it is today. Which will happen, because there's a lot of money in it.
