New Technology Protects Internet Advertisers From Click Fraud

In class this week we learned about search engines such as Google and Yahoo which hold auctions for keyword search results and have advertisement placement based on a pay-per-click process. Google says that “You’re charged only if someone clicks your ad, not when your ad is displayed”. Google charges about $2.66 per click if you’re one of the top three advertisements on their site. What would stop a person from going on theses website and clicking on a competitors advertisements, driving up the number of hits? This would charge the company being advertised more money hurting the company. This also alters the keyword search auction hurting the search engines. This crime is called “click fraud”. What would stop companies from tainting online auctions or running false auctions? For example what would happen if someone hacked a server while an online auction was in progress? They could change the winner, price and placement of an advertisement.

There is click fraud prevention technology in the works for websites such as Google and Yahoo to keep click count accurate. Yong Guan an electrical and computer engineer from Iowa State “is developing technologies to track down cyber criminals and make Web transactions more secure.” Guan is focused on such problems as network threats, click frauds and auction frauds. He plans to attack this problem by reinforcing the wireless infrastructure and beefing-up privacy protection. For the wireless infrastructure Guan plans to limit the access to networks by the use of managed accounts; by granting permission to access information. Some search engines already use an IP address as an indicator to eliminate multiple clicks. However hackers have already been known to network many computers together to circumvent this safety precaution through the use of viruses. That is why a managed account would fix this problem basing the click on the person signed in rather than the computer location or IP address. Also, for the keyword auction people could spam the internet with multiple copies of the same webpage moving there site up on the list. Filters which could scan sites and eliminate duplicates could solve this problem. These safety precautions once in place will help search engines and companies for a short while, however overtime hackers will find away to outwit these measures as the internet expands.