http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CJNIHMABY5FJMCRBAEOCFFA?type=topNews&storyID=8940234

The story notes:

Click fraud is not “fraud” as defined under the law. Rather, it is an industry term used to describe the deliberate clicking on Web search ads by users with no plans to do business with the advertiser.

Also, note that the plaintiff, Click Defense, Inc., sells software to detect or prevent click fraud, which makes me think this might just be a case of publicity-by-lawsuit.

Google’s Adwords ads are not reviewed for policy violations but on an ad hoc basis after the fact. As a result, advertisers can find their ads suddenly dropped by Google following complaints from partisans of any stripe.

For more on this disturbing situation, see:

- “Still Doing Evil:Google and Political Speech”

- “Google’s Gag Order: An Internet Giant Threatens Free Speech”

Yes, worlds are insular on the Internet at times, but many enemies read each others stuff more than third party organizations pay any attention.

But please, keep clicking away!

I agree with the general sentiment – that there are some tasks where computers aren’t going to be able to beat humans for quite a while – but I’m not sure about the example. A simple algorithm together with a very large database might be able to do much better than a human at predicting which books/music/films someone else would like. Amazon’s recommendations are often remarkably accurate (although they’re sometimes completely off the mark).

I don’t think it’s so obvious. I suspect that with enough information and with sophisticated enough algorithm, a computer might be able to beat you in picking present for your mom. But you do it much cheaper. For now.

Also, my understanding is that Google chooses ads based on expected revenue, which implies that they have some way of predicting roughly how well any particular ad will perform on any particular type of page (as classified by their algorithm). So I doubt they’d keep running ads that weren’t making them much money.

In other words, I suspect that Google (and their competitors) are busily adjusting their market mechanisms to keep that invisible hand from tipping too far one way or another.

Disclaimer: I work in advertising systems at Yahoo!; we compete with Google. However, my opinions expressed here bear no connection to my employer.

It’s silly to say that a computer should be able to do what a human brain can do. Sure, a computer can crunch some sorts of data much faster than a person, but with others even the best software and most expensive software fail miserably. Take as trivial a task for a human as driving, which is undertaken a billion times a day by hundreds of millions of people, with relatively few mistakes. The best robot driver in the Darpa “grand desert challenge” only managed about 7 miles on a open track in broad daylight relatively free from obstacles. Or at as seemingly straight-forward a task as playing the boardgame Go, even a novice player can beat the most sophisicated software.

A computer can certainly calculate the 100 digit of pi faster than I ever could, but I bet I will always be able to pick a better present for my mum than amazon’s suggestions.

The bad alternative (barring economic collapse, alien invasion, transformational new technology, or other large events that wash away the whole sandcastle) is that ad placement services blunder too visibly, advertisers take their nickels and dimes elsewhere, the bottom falls out of the weblog advertising market, and no one is left with sufficient incentive to develop more sophisticated methods.

That invisible hand has its awkward days as well as its deft ones.

in regard to a previous post, I would suspect that many readers of the ‘top’ blogs don’t go to the other side of the isle that much. I would suspect the readers of CT might as this blog is more apolitical and academic in nature…. but the average reader of any of the popular political blogs? I doubt it.

I personally don’t read Brad DeLong often, because I find him puerile, but I read this site and Kevin Drum almost every day, even though I often disagree with both the political and culinary views expressed here.

Anyway, the key mistake here is “left-leaning blogs are likely to “sound” Republican to Google’s algorithm because of the frequency with which they mention Republican politicians.” In other words, the problem your pointing out only “undermines the rationale” for word-frequency-based schemes.

There’s no reason why more sophisticated (and not , perhaps, even that much more sophisticated) algorithms couldn’t do a better job.

After all, your brain does it, so why not a computer?