Advertising and Communication : Google, fraud prevention

Résumé du document

Google inc. accomplished in a short amount of time something which nobody was able to forecast during the dot-com bubble era. They successfully maintained a huge and exponential growth. In the past few years, this little startup from Mountainview, CA, has become the standard in internet data collection and search domains. Strong from its success, Google is now extending activities on the Web both in practical projects, as well as in fundamental research to diversify and conquer new markets. However, such a success in world-wide usage brought has loads of actions against this new up-coming giant. Google set up a new widely used system and democratized the advertising-supported business model. However, many other virtual entities harbored the same ambitions. As we will subsequently review in greater detail later, Google's strategy is supported by the so called AdSense or AdWord advert system. Obviously, all attacks against this system are the center of Google's preoccupations. Thus, in order to protect their market and customers, they need to guarantee the reliability of their ad system.

Extraits

[...] Content spam Google uses robots for indexing and rating pages. These ones crawl the web and analyze page contents to find whether their fit with keywords. Obviously, the more the keyword appears on a website; the more robots will assume that the content is relevant for a word. In fact, many of sites use to hide keywords inside the source code, so the robots will record them without real users which are currently visiting the page would see it appear. [...]

[...] It is commonly argued that this situation is far to be riskfree, so we will try to explain why. In this part of the analysis, we will also bring a short description on how it really works. Then, we will focus on the fraud system itself, since we have to analyze what are the reasons for people overriding the rules. We will also talk about the range of fraud technics against AdSense and PageRank systems, and what are those which are efficient. [...]

[...] IP adress filtering When people register an account on AdSense, the IP address is flagged. Thus, if a click is registered within the same IP, account is pure and simply banned. Intrusive methods Google, through its variety of services, collects all sorts of information on users. If IP addresses can be spoofed, cookies and other embedded information can be useful to track frauders. Click patterns or tripple filtering Before sending money to the account owner, Google uses a schema to valid each click recorded. In jargon, this is called click pattern. [...]

[...] They will try to use bugs and security holes to earn easy money in faking users. The consequence for advertisers: They have to pay for clicks which did not bring any commercial action. What should following is well-known: drop in confidence and commercial failure for Google Technical means to fraud AdSense In this part, we will try to reviews methods that cheaters use to trick Google Advertisement Program (commonly called click fraud). All the following material is extracted from various bulletin boards, educational blogs on fraud, and some personal experience during internships. [...]

[...] In addition, Google provides some measurability tools so advertising companies can control if ads are profitable and if they reached the proper target. This by the way of complete statistics provided on the Google AdWords administration interface. However, being customer of Google AdWords does not impacts on the rank in the search engine itself. According to Google, there is no way to pay to increase the rank of a website. The only thing to do is spending time in good indexation with accurate keywords, and have great content to attract people on. [...]