Search Briefs: Click Fraud Investigation is BusinessWeek's Cover Story
No doubt that thousands of articles in both the mainstream press and business press have been published about click fraud. This week, BusinessWeek makes the topic its cover story in an investigation by Brian Grow and Ben Elgin. Along with the article you'll find numerous sidebars, graphics (the differences between click fraud 1.0 and 2.0), and slide shows.
+ Opens with the story of Mark Fleischmann, an Atlanta businessman (owns a company called MostChoice.com) who says click fraud, "cost his business more than $100,000 since 2003."
From the article:
"A BusinessWeek investigation has revealed a thriving click-fraud underground populated by swarms of small-time players, making detection difficult. "Paid to read" rings with hundreds or thousands of members each, all of them pressing PC mice over and over in living rooms and dens around the world. In some cases, "clickbot" software generates page hits automatically and anonymously."
From the article:
BusinessWeek's independent analysis of the MostChoice records turned up additional indications of click fraud. Over the past six months, the company received 139 visitors through an advertisement on the parked site healthinsurancebids.com, which offers only ads supplied by Yahoo. Most of these visitors were located in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Egypt, and Ukraine. Their average stay on MostChoice.com was only six seconds, and none of them became a customer.
The story includes several sidebars and a podcast.
+ Podcast
Online Extras
+ Click Fraud's Next Frontier
From the article,
"Search engines, marketers, and law-enforcement agencies are increasingly worried about networks of automated miscreants called "botnets." These are groups of computers that have been infected by malicious software that allows the fraudsters to seize control."
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
