businessweek.com — "When it comes to click fraud, search engines are on the defensive. In lawsuits, advertisers accuse Internet companies of failing to adequately guard against a practice that's lining the pockets of scam artists and artificially inflating ad rates. Part of the problem is that search engines like Google and Yahoo! aren't doing enough to stop it."
Aug 17, 2006 View in Crawl 4
buffalodanAug 18, 2006
yeah, but if you pay google per click, and somebody is just clicking away, then you are paying for a crappy return. That is who is mad. Google doesn't care, it is the people that are paying google.
wokethebearsAug 18, 2006
where in this article does it define what click fraud is or why people are doing it?
Closed AccountAug 18, 2006
I am sure Google has a extremely complex algorithm to catch click fraud. One must realize that it is difficult however. Anyway fraud happens in real life as often if not more than click fraud.
loftxAug 18, 2006
It's impossible to protect against click fraud completly, as a fradulent click can look exactly like a visitor in some cases. There's been plenty of times when I've clicked on what looked like an interesting advert, but when I got to the advertisors site I found I had been mislead by the ad and left immediatly.Of course there are algorithms to check for repeated clicks from a set of IP addresses or a sharp increase in clicks, but it's still easy to commit click fraud and get away with it. What advertisers need to do is decide if the level is acceptable and if it isn't cancel their accounts.
algorhythmAug 18, 2006
Right, anyone that thinks click fraud should be "expected" by advertisers is TOTALLY CLUELESS!!! Click fraud pays money directly to the fraudsters just for scamming the advertiser. In one instance I was involved in, my client's compeditors were clicking on our ads from multiple IPs and cost us an average of $1000/month. It took 6 months for Google to acknowledge this and still they've taken no real action.