July 24, 2006

Search engine marketers and PPC advertisers that are analyzing click fraud issues have been following the various developments in a case where Google is involved.

As part of the court settlement in the click-fraud case Lane’s Gifts vs Google, the company agreed with the plaintiffs to have an independent expert examine Google's detection methods, policies, practices and procedures.

The independent expert would also make a determination of whether or not Google had implemented reasonable measures to protect all of its advertisers.

The result of all this 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 on July 21.

The bottom-line conclusion of the report is that Google’s efforts against click fraud issues were deemed reasonable. At several points in his report, Dr. Tuzhilin calls out the quality of Google's inspection systems and notes that there is constant improvements.

It's an independent report, so not surprisingly there are other aspects of it with which Google dosen’t fully agree. But overall, it's a validation of what Google have said about its efforts against invalid clicks.

Some of the excerpts of the positive things Dr. Tuzhilin had to say about Google and invalid clicks are:

1) “During this project, I visited Google campus three times and interviewed over a dozen of the Click Quality team members from the Spam Operations and the Engineering groups, as well as the Product Manager of the Trust and Safety Group. I found the members of both groups to be well-qualified and highly competent to perform their jobs. Most of them have relevant prior backgrounds and strong credentials.”

2) “The current set of Google filters is fairly stable and only requires periodic 'tuning' and ‘maintenance’ rather than a radical re-engineering, even when major fraudulent attacks are launched against the Google Network.”

3) “These inspection systems have been developed by Google over an extensive period of time and are constantly improved to extend their functionality and make them better for the investigators to do their inspections more effectively. I have personally observed several such inspections and can attest to how successfully they have been conducted by Google’s investigators. This success can be attributed to:

a) The quality of the inspection tools
b) The and the level of professionalism of Google's Quality inspectors
c) The existence of certain investigation processes and procedures helping the investigators

“Google has built the following four 'lines of defense' for detecting invalid clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual offline detection, in that order.

Google deploys different detection methods in each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based approach in the offline manual inspection stage.

This deployment of different methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early stages.”

Source: Google Blog