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Google's Fraud Squad Battles Phantom Clicks
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tue Jul 20, 2004 08:01 AM
from the unfortunate-necessities dept.
from the unfortunate-necessities dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It's an open secret that low cost workers in India, China and other countries are hired to boost traffic for online ads by clicking on text links, banners etc. Internet marketers facing high advertising fees on search networks like Google are becoming increasingly concerned about this form of online fraud. This problem has reached a critical stage and even Google recognizes that it has been the target of individuals and entities "using some of the most advanced spam techniques for years". A Google spokesperson said the company has "applied what we have learned with search to the click fraud problem and employed a dedicated team and proprietary technology to analyse clicks.""
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Google's Fraud Squad Battles Phantom Clicks
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Open secret? (Score:5, Funny)
> are hired to boost traffic for online ads by clicking on text links, banners etc.
That's like 'common knowledge', right?
Anyway, I click on lots of lots of ads. The ones that make it through AdBlock, anyway. Shortly before I add them to my block list. I do hope I'm not skewing anyone's statistics. I'd hate for commercial websites to suffer.
Re:Open secret? (Score:5, Funny)
So tell me, have you gained those three inches yet? I, er, have a friend who was wondering...
Re:Open secret? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ads are like taxes.. they support the things that people want to use but don't want to pay for.
-B
Re:Open secret? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.google.org/)
Here is some more detailed info [searchenginewatch.com].
Because of thier desire for the IPO alot of financial info is now available.
Re:Open secret? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://trolltalk.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 24, @08:16AM)
Re:Open secret? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 14 2004, @05:03PM)
Yup. Like most of the geeks here, I mostly use browsers that can do things like block images from sites, so as to cut down on the more obnoxious ads. But I've also bought a fair number of things online over the years. And when I'm looking to buy something, I tend to first ask google about it. Both the matches and the accompanying ads are useful in that case.
Dunno how well it works with the general population, but google's approach is fairly good for people who are trying to find something and just get annoyed by irrelevant ads.
We oughta let them know that we appreciate their subtler approach to the whole topic.
In a few cases, commercial sites have asked me how I found them, and I've enjoyed telling them that I used google. That oughta give some of their marketing people a bit of a pause, since they probably "know" that google's approach isn't very successful at selling.
Re:Open secret? (Score:4, Insightful)
I second that. I lost a keyring while on a cross contry hike. The chances of finding them are very slim. They are somewhere in about a 1 mile square wooded area with no trails and lots of underbrush.
I was apalled by the price the dealer wanted for a replacement transponder key and remote. It took some weeding out of the Google results, but I found programming instructions online. Keys varied from $18 to $125 each online. Remotes were about double that. I bought the keys (I got an extra spare) and remote online for less than what the dealer wanted for 1 key. (over $60) The dealer wanted over $150 for the remote. I did the programming myself and had a key shop cut the keys for $1.00 each. Google saved me over $140 for the keys and remote. Needless to say, stuff I wasn't looking for was just in the way. If you are advertising, show up in a search and in good reviews. (yes I check history, discussion boards, and BBB) I'm not a easy target for online fraud. Advertising mobile locksmith services when I'm searching for key blanks is useless. (Nice try Streetkeys) When I need a mobile locksmith, I'll search for one.
Hats off to Coastal Tech for having all the programming information online for the keys and remote for the Prius. Thanks for the affordable keys.
Same thing when I'm looking for bulk inkjet ink, don't advertise your refilled cartridges. I'm looking for supplies to do it myself. Show up in revelant searches, not anything remotely related. It'll save you advertising dollars and me time weeding out the cruft.
Re:Open secret? (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if a new "no change" bit was put on all tv sets so that when a commercial came on that you did not like, you were not able to change the channel? I have two little children and when smut tv ads come on, the channel is changed.
There are too many pr0n and gimmick ads on the net. I don't mind targeted ads, for example, tech ads on /. I don't mind, though I don't care for graphical and/or flash ads and usually block them. Another thing to keep in mind with text based ads are that they are very hard to block, especially if the server grabs the text ad and sends down the HTML, then you cannot block by server such as *servedby.*.
It is not the job of consumers to keep a business or business model afloat. It is the businesses job to make sure they are changing to meet demand. If most of the internet advertising companies stop with the spyware, popups, homepage jacking, etc and switched to plain text or simple HTML, there would be a lot less effort in blocking the ads and probably many more clicks on the ads.
Re:Open secret? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google's ads have teo more important features (Score:4, Insightful)
Well with Google's ads, espically the ones on Google itself, I find them highly relivant and honest. When I search for something, a list of companies that want to sell me that thing pop up on the right hand side. In fact, that's how I find shops to buy things, quite frequently.
I wanted a Bogen tripod. I had used them, and was quite happy with the quality. Problem: I do not know where one gets Bogen tripods. So I use Google. On the left was informational links, such as Bogen's own site, on the right was a whole list of pro video shops happy to sell me Bogen tripods. I browsed a couple shops, chose one, and bought the tripod.
Google holds the record for being the only ad provider that I've ever clicked through and immediatly bought something. Others I've clicked on for intrest (I do from
Re:Open secret? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://ekj.vestdata.no/)
Let me make a example; You own property, you rent it out to a company wanting to put up a billboard. With this, you make $X profit. The company considers the effects of the ad-campaign worth more than they pay you, so they also come out ahead.
However, the other property around your migth degrade in value as a result of the visually noisy advertising. Or the people passing trough every day migth consider the ads annoying and be willing to pay (in aggregate !) more to be free of the ads than your profit is.
Summa summarum, a net loss, but the loss is on other parts than you and the advertiser.
Other example, which more slashdotters will agree with;
You hire me to send 1 million emails with ads for your product. The sales generated give you $5000 in profit, and I do the mailing for $2000, having costs of my own of $500.
We both come out ahead, you by $3000 and I by $1500. $4500 in sum. Looks good, no ?
Until you consider the loss for the 1 million receivers. If the sum of annoyances at the ISP and end-user exceeds 0.45 *cent* pro message, then emailing the spam wasn't really profitable. It only looked that way to you because you get the profits, and someone else carries the cost.
If you think about it, this ain't rare in advertising, though rarely is it so blatant as with spam.
Re:Open secret? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.nexusuk.org/)
The problem ads are the completely untargetted popups, stupid annoying animated gifs, flash, and increasingly DHTML floating objects (see the Dilbert site for details).
Rather than discouraging sites from using adverts at all (which will result in many useful sites shutting down), shouldn't we be enouraging them to use acceptable, and dare I say it - useful advertising? If for one find Google's *targetted* ads useful.
The same can be said of TV ads - if I see an ad that looks funny while watching TV I'll actually watch it, but if (like the vast majority) the ad is designed to be as annoying as possible, I'll just fastforward through it using my MythTV box. The advertisers need to be trained that spamming the consumers with annoying crap is unacceptable, but providing them with well targetted and not annoying ads is worthwhile.
Gee. (Score:5, Funny)
Does anyone have a mirror just in case?
Re:Gee. (Score:5, Funny)
Here you go [google.ca].
Re:Gee. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.houghi.org/)
Does anyone have a mirror just in case?
Sure, no problem. The mirror is here: http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:zhool8dxBV4J
Re:Gee. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.abovetheinternet.co.uk/)
"Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content."
That is shirking corporate responsibility if ever I saw it.
Stuart
Re:Gee. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Perhaps the next form of spamming? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.gentoo.org/)
Already exists, kind of. (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Saturday January 31 2004, @05:25PM)
I wouldn't be surprised if the operators of certain sites (usually with the more obnoxious and dubious ads) would stoop to such methods to boost their income from ads.
Golden opportunity (Score:5, Funny)
Best regards,
419
I wonder how many times they've punched the monkey (Score:4, Funny)
"proprietary technology" (Score:3, Insightful)
how much (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://sitetheory.com/ | Last Journal: Friday October 24 2003, @10:59AM)
I was under the impession internet ads didn't pay that much anymore.
Would the cost of even 3rd world workers not be almost the same as the profit from clicking links all day?
Clicking helps their ad karma ranking (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://web.mit.edu/~rhett/www/index.html)
Re:Clicking helps their ad karma ranking (Score:5, Informative)
(http://septum.org/)
Automate it (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.elpauer.org/)
Why would someone hire people to click banners when you could automate it?
You just need a bit of programming to parse webpages looking for Google (or other companies' ads).
Add some ip-spoofing (easy if the destination web server runs Windows) and make the program distribute clicks using some kind of probability distribution (for instance, a Gauss distribution), and it will look perfectly legal.
Indeed, if you find any ads company that still pays per click, and set some of those banners in a site of yours, you could earn a lot of money.
I described deeply this procedure in 1999 in a paper called Simulating hits to a HTTP server [teleco.upv.es]. Sadly, it is only in Catalan (if you have interest, e-mail me and I'll try to translate it for you).
Re:Automate it (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.spamblogging.com/ | Last Journal: Monday April 19 2004, @04:55PM)
Google's code is placed on the site as a javascript include that then gets rendered to the screen at runtime when a browser executes it.
That means if you have a script hit the page and get the source for it, all you get is the javascript include.
If you write a page that onClick let's you view the content of the Google IFrame (the Javascript include dumps out an Iframe that then fills with a page off of Google), you will then see more of the code.
They have several layers of javascript and none of the pages render out links directly, so it is hard to scrape them with a bot, since a bot only sees the source.
You could load up the pages individually (outside of the iframe) and take a look at them, but it doesn't always work and also when you load that page, it sends back a reference to Google of what the site/location/name of the page you are loading looks like.
So if you have a site ballsweat.com that has Google Ads on it so that you can look to see what the ads look like, as you start messing around with it to get a better idea, they will see that it is no longer showing up on the site and instead showing up on your hard drive (or if you like you can put it on your server and then they can read your code that you are using).
That alone will tip them that you are looking into it - but then you could claim that it was someone else and not you (assuming it was on a drive), but then that could also mean that you just use someone else's site to test.
So anyway, back to getting the data, you would have to load up the source, and then either parse the javascript and execute it to build it the same way a browser does (hopefully there are objects in Windows that let you simulate this and then dump the post rendered contents into a variable which you can scan - don't know about that),.
OCR is out of the question since that is not going to get you the proper link (the links are listed, but the payment only goes out if you click on the link which first routes it through a Google site so it can register the click and track the stats and then redirects you to the site). When you mouseover it shows the regular site link, but that is done via javascript.
Then you run the issue that Google would have to be retarded to just let a single IP crunch through a ton of ads everyday.
So then you have to worry about spoofing - in this case it could arguably be blind spoofing - but the problem there isn't that you want to load web pages - that would actually work with blind spoofing (say I am computer A, and I want to tell server B that computer C is connecting to it, and that it should send the page data there), but the problem is again that it is only going to send raw HTML/javascript source down that connection and it is them going to drop off of that machine.
So the site (Google in this case since you loaded a page and then "clicked" a link) registers the hit, but the page never gets rendered, so the Google page is never displayed and the redirect never happens - one could assume that Google is aware of this and wouldn't count that as a hit since the other page never gets loaded.
So even if you could past all of that (heh, feels like shades of Oceans 11), then there is the issue that Google (technically it isn't Google, but a series of companies that they farm out the AdWords content - learned that from an investment bank friend that sat in on the IPO workings - yay) monitors this shit and looks for anomalies.
So while you were getting 200 hits a 2 clicks every day for a month, if you all of the sudden are getting 2000 hits and day and 200 clicks, they are going to investigate your site.
If nothing has changed to show that there should be new interest in your site (new ad placement, new content, etc) and they can do searches and see that there aren't any new sites pointing to you - then all signs point to you cheating.
And then on top of all of that, we can show that a Gaussian distribution
One answer is simple... (Score:4, Insightful)
seriously though...this doesn't solve the problem of judging how popular a link it, by how much traffic it gets (since much of the traffic can be false), but it does solve the "drive-by-clicking" technique that can cost companies money...
You saw it here first. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.julefrokost.info/ | Last Journal: Wednesday April 07 2004, @03:52AM)
Re:You saw it here first. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://septum.org/)
if they want to generate traffic to a page where you can download a paper which might generate a sale, which takes place via phone and take weeks to complete?
if google switched over to CPA they'd lose a looooot of money
Re:You saw it here first. (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday October 15, @11:53PM)
Which then gives the advertisers incentive to trick people into comming to their site.
Then, they get nobody buying the product advertized, BUT they get more recognition, etc.
In fact, I don't like click-counting at all... only views. Why should the web-page designer be held repsonsible because the advertiser makes crappy ad-banners, or tries to sell junk products?
Do you get to pay for TV ads based on the number that go out and buy the product? No. You pay for your chance to display your ad to X number of people, and it's up to the advertisers to create an effective ad, as well as advertising the products they THINK people want to buy.
As WWW ads currently exist, there's a lot of burden on the site operator, for no good reason.
Geez. (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://itsbeenconfirmed.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday May 04 2003, @02:33AM)
Why not use Perl? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.floriopics.com/)
Ever hear of LWP?
Re:What incentive? (Score:5, Informative)
If Google just let this happen, they would be saying to advertisers "you're getting screwed, but we're profiting, so we're happy." This might tarnish Google's saintly image and make people not want to pay them money.
You might as well say that cellphone companies shouldn't stop phone cloning, because if someone steals my identity and starts making calls to Nigeria, the phone company can bill me big time! But if they didn't do their best to stop the fraud, they would soon lose my custom.
So that's what I need to do! (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.wedding-organizer.co.uk/ | Last Journal: Monday October 01, @06:15AM)
" In certain sectors, such as travel, legal advice and gaming, the cost can reach several dollars per click.
Step 1: scrap my free software based www site.
Step 2: welcome to my FPS-holidays-for-lawyers website!
Step 3: Profit!!
This could be big (Score:3, Insightful)
No doubt fradusters will keep dreaming up more innovative schemes to get this done. I wonder if the Google API could be used towards this goal or in fighting it. Perhaps by setting up a Google Alert [googlealert.com] to search for fraud schemers, the good guys can stay a step ahead.
Country-specific clicks? (Score:3, Insightful)
I work with a mail order business which does zero orders to third world countries like India, and it's no skin off our back of we were to simply "ban" our ads from India.
Clickety-Click (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.theschmoejoes.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday June 19 2004, @02:56PM)
Go ahead! Slashdot them [slashdot.org]! That will teach them to steal ad revenues!
Click through rates (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://jfctravelclub.com/travelblog/)
Anyway, more worrying about this scheme would be false positives meaning some people were getting less ad money than they were entitled to.
Moving off topic (so stop reading now if that bothers you), there's a lot of extensions for Firefox and Mozilla (and probably other apps - not looked) that do things with Gmail including provide a new notification icon in your toolbar (weblogs.mozillazine.org/doron/), upload contents of a Mozilla, Thunderbird or any other mailer that uses the standard mbox format and probably tools to download Gmail and serve it to a regular mail client.
Currently these methods are unsupported by Google - in fact some violate their terms of service. It'd be good to see Google to make some of these extensions official and make Firefox the number one Gmail browser, I mean MS do this with Hotmail in Outlook Express and as Firefox uses Google as a default search engine then they don't have to worry as much about an IE service pack resetting the browsers default home and search pages to MSN.
Gmail users - you have a feedback option - in the top right click on help. In the new page there should be an option down the left for feedback.
sweet (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, just like what I do at work everyday right here in US, Surfing the web and get paid.
When I contacted Google... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.dixie-chicks.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday July 24, @05:17PM)
I got a nice form letter suggesting I check my referrer logs, but basically brushing me off. Understandable, if frustrating. What did I want them to do, say "OMFG WERE TOAST!"?
Strangely, though, the bump lasted exactly a week. May 1-7 had triple volume or more, then the stats settled down to exactly the pattern they've followed since the site's subject [dixie-chicks.com] dropped off the face of the planet. I don't know if Google found the problem and fixed it, or if perhaps they were giving me catch-up credit for some previous bug.
All in all, though, they still look like the Good Guys. Hope it can last longer than CDNow.
Why didn't google act faster? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.lucidwindow.net/wp)
Ok, that wasn't fair . . . in all seriousness, this would devalue google's most significant revenue source by increasing the number of clickthroughs that happen per dollar revenue for the companies that pay for the ads. The bid price for clickthrough ads would invariably go down.
I'm surprised that Google hasn't been working on this problem harder, because if I remember from the article correctly, over 90% of google's revenue comes from ads. If Google fails to correct this problem, their whole business model may be destroyed (or at least crippled) by this problem.
Is it a secret? Or simply an urban legend? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hard references, please! If you don't have any, then we know this is an urban legend. The big flaw in this theory is that it would be much cheaper and simpler to simply write a little program to send the HTTP requests than to have people clicking on links. It would be like paying people to copy text off of web pages when you could just print it out instead.
I Have To Ask (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.gh-sts.com/HOWTO | Last Journal: Tuesday November 01 2005, @09:39PM)
At what point do all these stupid marketers wake up and say 'Oh, gee... the internet was not created to be a worldwide marketplace, it was created to share information and we attempted to usurp it. Maybe we should have thought of that before we stuck our greedy fists into a network we didn't understand.'
I couldn't a shit less about the problems all these stupid marketers face. The Internet is meant to share information, it's not meant to be a global market. That's the reason you have all these problems with spam and abuse of the traditional marketing mechanisms - it's a system to share information with minimal checks and balances.
Outsourcing would really work here! (Score:3, Funny)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 25, @09:39AM)
Except Googles approach doesn't work... (Score:4, Interesting)
They are very much throwing the baby out with the bathwater -- it's perfectly possible to kill a rivals cash flow if they're using Google simply by running a bot to click on all the ads on their site. (I think this is what happened in my case) Of course, as Google present no evidence you can't then sue your rival.
I would immediately switch to some other advertising network if there was one available for smaller (~8-9 million hits a month) web sites in the UK. Sadly, there isn't - yet.
Google would profit from but doesn't want fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://ostermiller.org/ | Last Journal: Friday February 17 2006, @11:59AM)
Google would profit from but doesn't want fraud.
Advertisers don't care about clicks. They care about conversions. Advertisers want people to come to their site and then open the wallet. A conversion is somebody that came to the site and then bought something. Advertisers measure the success of the campain by the net profit. That means they track how many people converted and then figure out how much a click is worth to them statistically. If a campaign was sucessful, they want to continue the campaign. In the best case for Google, they want to expand the campaign or would be willing to pay more for the campaign.
While it might be in Google's short term interest to have fraudulent clicks, it is not in their long term interest. They will lose advertisers who have to pay for fake clicks because the advertisers are tracking it.
automate? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Wouldn't it be incredibly easy, and much more efficient, to automate this process?
Re:To All The People Worried About Ad Fraud... (Score:5, Insightful)
My approach to advertising is very black & white:
1. Corporations rip us off by lying to us through advertisements. If someone rips off the corporations with some ingenuity and stays within the law then good luck to them with my blessing.
2. I turn on my TV, there's adverts. I turn on my radio, there's adverts. I read a magazine or newspaper, there's adverts. I buy a DVD and at the beginning there's trailers (=adverts). Hell, I even fill my car up at the petrol station and if I don't look at the TV screen overhead playing adverts at me, I stare down at the petrol pump nozzle and on the 3" diameter circle on the top, there's an... wait for it... advert (usually for a bar of chocolate).
Hey, I'm a capitalist scum consumer just like the rest of you but if my girlfriend went on at me as much as advertisements do, I'd have left her by now.
My greatest fear is not death but arriving at the gates of Heaven only to see a "Sponsored by Coca Cola sign on them."
Re:To All The People Worried About Ad Fraud... (Score:4, Insightful)
Personal pension schemes that promised better returns than they actually did...
Adverts for loans and car insurances that use glitzy imagery to divert you from the small subtext "they have to say" due to government regulation...
A racist Pepsi advert that portrays an Indian man as an elephant trainer - how cliched is that? - and even uses a fake Indian accent to his English...
Cosmetics that blatantly do not deliver the "age protection" they claim to...
If I looked more carefully I could find more examples but I genuinely avoid as much advertising as possible.