Web of deceit hides behind Google's success

My friend was feeling pleased. A smalltime businessman, he recently revamped his firm's website. His market is global, and the best way for him to reach potential customers is to use Google.

He signed with Google AdWords, created an advertisement and chose keywords so that whenever someone searched those words, his ad appeared alongside. Every time someone clicked on the ad, he was charged by Google.

At first, there was a slight increase in traffic. Then it went mad. The Google bills also soared. It didn't matter, he thought, because his sales would also rise. Except they didn't - he was a victim of click fraud.

He contacted Google and was credited some of his money back. What he suspects happened is that a rival was clicking on his Google ad, knowing that every time there was a click, he had to pay.

This is the darker side of Google. Behind the smiling image of the company that was set up by its geeky founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and went on to conquer the world, is a potential goldmine for criminals and tricksters.

Crookery

AdWords is one of two advertising products offered by Google. The other is AdSense, where website owners agree to receive relevant adverts on their pages. Each occasion someone clicks on the ad, the advertiser is charged by Google - with the money shared between Google and the website owner. That, too, is open to crookery. What happens is that a bogus website is set up, it's sent ads by Google, and the website owner clicks away on the ads, making a tidy profit.

If Google finds the website owner is clicking on the ads, it will close them down. The company says it is "pro-actively and reactively" monitoring to check what its clients are up to. The reality, though, is that Google is so big, and click fraud so relatively easy, that the problem is enormous.

Estimates vary as to how large: latest figures from Click Forensics, an internet monitoring service, reckon fraudulent clicks account for 14.2 per cent of all pay-per-clicks; on the AdSense-type service, the fraud rate is put at 19.2 per cent; MarketingExperiments.com, an online researcher, found that almost 30 per cent of the clicks in three experimental campaigns on Google were fake.

Conflict of interest

If its scale is huge, so too is the possible conflict of interest - however hard Google denies it, a high proportion of the corporation's earnings is founded upon the scams of others. It's not just Google - Yahoo and Microsoft, anyone that uses pay-per-click is similarly prone. So far, the issue has barely surfaced. Last year, in Arkansas in the US, a judge sanctioned a $90 million settlement in a class action brought by a group of advertisers who maintained Google had improperly charged them for fraudulent clicks.

But there's no denying Google is in a tough place. It has created a money-spinner that is difficult to police effectively (it's worth pointing out, as well, that not all advertisers scream and shout about being defrauded - they regard being fleeced as a price worth paying for the amount of bona fide additional take-up they receive by being on Google).

There's also the sense of a company that could do better - critics complain it's too Big Brother and high-handed, claiming it threatens to cut them off if they step too far out of line. Opponents argue that customers are often kept in the dark - that when they say they've been defrauded and Google investigates, it never explains which clicks were held to be fraudulent and which ones were not.