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WSJ blog has an interesting piece on why companies are suing Google for nasty comments:

The Journal’s Ben Worthen wrote an interesting item yesterday about how organizations fed up with lousy commentary about their products and services are suing Google.

The thinking goes like this: Google makes it possible for criticism, true or not, to linger indefinitely for potential customers to read. So the search engine should be held responsible.

Mr. Worthen makes the point that suing Google is a bit like suing the company that makes the magnifying glass that allowed you to see the crack in your windshield.

Its time to make the conversations more credible my holding contributors accountable for their utterances…SezWho can help.

Check out this interesting review from Andy C’s blog about how SezWho can help with spam…

Interesting post on inside Adwords blog about the extent of click fraud. The upshot is that Google is claiming that they are only seeing 0.02% of all clicks as being invalid clicks but initially recorded by Google as valid clicks. Here is the interesting bit:

Our Click Quality team investigates every inquiry we receive from advertisers who believe they may have been affected by undetected click fraud. Many of these cases are misunderstandings, but in most cases where malicious activity is found, the clicks have already been filtered out (and not charged for) by our real-time filters. Because of the broad operation of our proactive detection, the relatively rare cases we find of advertisers being affected by undetected click fraud constitute less than 0.02% of all clicks.

Put another way, for every ten thousand clicks on Google AdWords ads, fewer than two are reactively detected cases of possible click fraud. This proportion has stayed within this range every quarter since we launched AdWords, even as the issue of click fraud has received more widespread media attention. In the cases of reactively detected invalid clicks, a refund or credit is provided to the advertiser, and we utilize the discovery as a feedback mechanism to improve our proactive detection systems.

They explain it with a diagram as follows:

The interesting question though is how many of these clicks are invalid that even the Google Click Quality Team is not able to detect? I just don’t know its possible with filtering or with humans to detect all kinds of click fraud scenarios. The is especially troublesome because Google does not allow its advertisers to control where there ads will be shown. This makes it really hard for customers and Google to detect the fraud based on more controllable set of conditions thereby making it a more manageable problem. Apparently some advertisers are getting frustrated with Google and switch to one of their upcoming competitors, profiled recently by NYT:

Google and Yahoo have been fighting it out over which company will dominate the online advertising business, with Google maintaining the upper hand so far.

But in the competition for contextual text ads — those small sponsored links that run adjacent to related articles online — both companies are facing a challenge from a tiny but growing adversary named Quigo Technologies, a New York-based ad service that bills itself as an alternative to the giants.

In the last year and a half, a trickle of large media sites like ESPN.com, FoxNews.com and Cox Newspapers’ 17 sites have stopped using Google and Yahoo and instead signed up with Quigo.

What Quigo offers is transparency and control in what can often be an opaque business: advertisers pay Yahoo and Google for contextual ad placement on a wide variety of Web pages, but get little say over where those ads run or even a list of sites where they do appear.

Quigo, by contrast, gives advertisers not only the list of specific sites where their ads have appeared but also the opportunity to buy only on specific Web sites or particular pages on those sites. It also allows media company sites like ESPN.com and FoxNews.com a chance to manage their own relationships with advertisers.

Although Quigo remains a small competitor, with less than 10 percent of the contextual ad business, its growing success has apparently persuaded Google, which is accustomed to calling the shots in all aspects of its business, that it has to change the way it sells the sponsored link ads in the future.

Quigo still has a long way to go, but its nice to see some of the advertisers and web-sites getting a little bit more say in their ad placements. This can only lead to good things for the overall online ad market.

10 Minute Mail is a new service for creating temporary email addresses. These addresses can be used for registering on sites that require users to provide an email address. The goal is to to rid users of a lot of unsolicited spam emails. Chris Null from Yahoo! has a review of the service:

Well here’s a brain-dead simple solution to the problem: 10 Minute Mail (Note: Web traffic from this story may be causing the 10 Minute Mail site to crash. If it doesn’t load, try it again later.), which provides, for free, exactly what is promised in the name: An email address that vanishes after 10 minutes. There’s no registration, no verification. Just click over to the site and hit “Get my 10 Minute Mail e-mail address.” You’ll instantly be given an address that ceases to exist after 10 minutes. You can then use this address in filling out web forms or whatnot, and a very simple web-based interface gives you full access to any mail the account receives. You can reply to any messages, but you can’t send mail to an account that hasn’t already emailed you. If you can’t get the job done in 10 minutes, you can reset the timer to 10 minutes at any time. There’s no need to login, no password to remember.

For safe surfing and spam avoidance, I haven’t found a simpler, more elegant solution than 10 Minute Mail. It works flawlessly and couldn’t be easier to use. It’s earned a place in my Favorites folder. Give it a spin and see what you think!

I can see this being useful when you want to register for some event or something but you don’t want to receive any follow on emails…Typically, though, most users (including me) have an email address just for the purpose of registering for services that could send spam emails.

Now, what happens if a site requires users to give a valid email address, as part of their term of service (TOS). Isn’t using 10minutemail generated addresses a violation of such terms? Also all the emails that this service generates are from domain 10minutemail.com…Couldn’t the sites that are asking for user email address just reject emails with 10minutemail.com domain, as part of email validation?

Overall, it just seems like a wrong solution to the problem. The real solution is to punish businesses or service providers that spam their users by signing out or boycotting them. Trying to fake one’s identity to avoid potential spam mail, just does not seem like the right way to address this issue.