Another google news...

Fraud nags at Google's grand strategy from The Hindu

JOHN CARRERAS was once a contented Google advertiser. He used text adverts that appeared alongside searches to bring people to his trade exhibition website. He happily paid Google a few cents for every referral, believing that anyone who clicked through to his site from Google was a likely customer. But then he attended a conference in Las Vegas, and he noticed something strange: the number of Google referrals he was getting dropped dramatically, only to rise again once the conference was over.

Mr. Carreras became convinced the "missing clicks" were not from customers, but from his competitors, who had all been in Vegas along with him. He believed his unscrupulous rivals whiled away their office hours clicking on his Google ads, knowing that every tap cost him money.

If you add in a second kind of scam, where people earn themselves a little money from Google by clicking on ads they are hosting on their own sites, you can see the potential for malice. Click fraud, as it is called, is acknowledged by Google as a problem: last year, Google chief financial officer George Reyes described it as "the biggest threat to the internet economy."