Google, (GOOG) which has been in a hard place in the last several months because of reports on excessive click fraud, has began to release information concerning fraud to its advertisers beginning Tuesday night.
Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for trust and safety at Google, said that the company will reveal to advertisers the number of clicks that they uncover as illegal on its advertising network.
Ghosemajumder also said in an interview that, "this gives them the data that shows that Google is doing what we say we have been doing."
On consulting firm, Click Forensics, has estimated that up to one in eight clicks across all online ad networks could be fraudulant.
In response Ghosemajumder said that the one in eight figure is far above the reality of the fraud. He said that the automatic filters they have in place the true losses to advertisers are "very small."
Alexander Tuzhilin, a professor of information systems at New York University, an independent technical that submitted a 47-page report to the Arkansas state court, said in the report that Google made "reasonable" efforts to fight against click fraud and that they had it under control by the end of 2005. He added that it still doesn't have the system perfected yet.
Tuzhilin commented about Google's alleged secrecy and lack of explanations to its advertisers that "After examining how their inspection system works, I can understand this secrecy,'' he wrote. He said providing explanations could educate unethical users and create the possibility of 'massive click fraud.'"
The problem with Google has been its silence. I think most honest people understand the need to protect from unethical people from taking advantage of the system even further. But their silence on percentages of fraud and lack of communication and disclosure with advertisers, caused wild speculation that could have been stopped by what they are simply doing now.
Hopefully they've learned their lesson.
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