Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Some fine weekend reading for search engineers, SEOs, and spam network operators:

A 47-page independent report on Google Adwords / Adsense click fraud, filed yesterday as part of a legal dispute between Lane’s Gifts and Google, provides a great overview of the history and current state of click fraud, invalid clicks of all types, and the four-layered filtering process that Google uses to detect them.

Google has built the following four “lines of defense” against invalid clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual offline detection, in that order. Google deploys different detection methods in each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based approach in the offline manual inspection stage. This deployment of different methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early stages.

It seems that a lot of the interesting content from last week’s analyst event at Google is in the speaker notes from the PowerPoint slide deck. Greg Linden and others have already pointed out the notes about Google’s storage plans (GDrive, Lighthouse on slide 19).

This afternoon there’s another blip on CNBC about accidental communications in the slides.

The previously undisclosed notes stated that Google’s core advertising business was expected to grow by nearly 60 percent to $9.5 billion in 2006 but that profit margins in its mainstay AdSense business could be squeezed this year and beyond.

I didn’t remember seeing a revenue forecast in there, so I went back and looked to see what it actually said (slide 14).

Our ads business for the moment is healthy and growing and we’re on a strong trajectory
projected to grow from $6bn this year to $9.5bn next year based purely on trends in traffic and monetization growth

Some thoughts following the Microsoft splash this week:

The big PR launch for Windows Live last Tuesday announced a set of web services initiatives. It probably drives a lot of Microsoft people crazy to have the technology and business resources that they do, and to have so little mindshare in the “web 2.0″ conversations that are going on. I haven’t read through or digested all the traffic in my feed reader, but it looks like a lot of people are unimpressed by the Microsoft pitch. Been there, done that. Which is true, as far as I can see. The more interesting question is whether this starts to change the flow of money and opportunities around developing for and with Microsoft products and technologies.

If I do a quick round of free association, I get something like this:

Microsoft:

• corporate desktop
• security update
• vista delayed
• who’s departed this week

Google seems to be trying out some alternate layouts for the search results pages. This morning, I got one page with just a small Google logo next to the text box, which keeps more results on the screen, and a couple of pages with a larger box of text ads at the top, which was bad, because it pushed the useful results down the page.

I hope they keep the small logo, without the big text ads at the top. The text ads at the top would probably generate some incremental revenue for Google, but hurts the usability. For me, this is partially because I’ve gotten used to Google’s page layout, so I can’t scan the results page as quickly.

I’m doing a little experimenting with AdSense. So far most of my pages come up with ads for “Start your blog now” or “Sexy Girls & Sexy Guys”. It’s interesting to see which posts trigger a keyword match. I have observed a few posts that have switched from generic blog ads to a topical ad after a followup visit from the Mediapartners-Google crawler. You’d think that a post on the Blackdog Linux Server, the Yahoo-Alibaba deal, or visiting the Mona Lisa at the Louvre would trip a keyword or two.

The banners are only on the single post templates at the moment, so you’ll need to click on a post to see them. There’s also a set of vertical text ads at the bottom of the sidebar. I can tell I’m probably going to end up starting on a round of site revisions by the time I’m done with this, although I’m just interested in getting a better handle on the advertising and affiliate space at the moment.