Google has officially announced a new AdWords feature enabling advertisers to have a much more detailed picture of invalid click activity in their account. The metrics of “invalid clicks” and “invalid clicks rate” will show virtually all the invalid clicks affecting an account.

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/07/estimating-invalid-clicks.html

Here’s their official explanation of the new feature:

“These clicks are filtered in real-time by our systems before advertisers are charged for them. The resulting data will of course differ from one advertiser to the next. In addition, a much smaller number of invalid clicks may also be credited to advertisers? accounts after-the-fact, as the result of a publisher being terminated from the AdSense program for invalid click activity. These will appear as account-level credits.One of the most controversial issues related to the topic of click fraud has been estimating how big the problem is. Estimates from third-parties (usually from consultants who have a financial incentive to make the problem seem very large) have been both inconsistent and greatly exaggerated due to their methodologies. Advertisers have always been able to compare their log data with their AdWords charges to calculate an estimate of the number of invalid clicks in their own account. This new tool will make estimating invalid click activity much easier.

Remember, when we determine that clicks are invalid, you are not charged for them, and they do not affect your other campaign statistics. You may include the invalid clicks and invalid click rate columns in yearly, quarterly, weekly, and daily reports. More information about the new reporting can be found here.”

As is published in their AdWords Help Center, Google has three powerful tools for protecting your clicks:

Detection and filtering techniques: Each click on an AdWords ad is examined by Google system. Google looks at numerous data points for each click, including the IP address, the time of the click, any duplicate clicks, and various other click patterns. It then analyzes these factors to try to isolate and filter out potentially invalid clicks.

Advanced monitoring techniques: Google uses a number of unique and innovative techniques for managing invalid click activity, and is currently improving its technology.

The Google Team: In addition to its automated click protection techniques, Google has a team that uses specialized tools and techniques to examine individual instances of invalid clicks. When the system detects potentially invalid clicks, a member of this team examines the affected account to glean important data about the source of the potentially invalid clicks.

Weirdtechnewshub blogspot has posted a guide on how to run a report with data from an invalid clicks.

Yahoo is finally taking its new home page, previously in beta at yahoo.com/preview, live on the main yahoo.com site. We’ve all know this was coming for some time. Yahoo began testing the new home page with some users back in February. In May, Yahoo made the new page available to everyone at the yahoo.com/preview domain linked to above.

The new Yahoo! home page includes enhancements that allow consumers to turn to the Web daily to read news, search for information, stay in touch with their community and discover what’s happening around the globe. It combines frequently updated news and entertainment with useful tools for searching, connecting, sharing and communicating online — all on one simple, easy-to-use Web page.

The new home page has a significantly different layout than the current look, as well as some Ajax integration, DHTML and more personalization features. Other new features are discussed in a Yahoo’s blog post discussing the new home page on May 15, 2006. In that post, they call it “the most significant redesign of the www.yahoo.com home page ever”. Given that Yahoo is the largest site on the Internet (despite recent gains by MySpace), their embrace of new web technologies is an important evolution. Millions of people may have their first interaction with Ajax in the coming days.

Gollum is a Wikipedia Browser for fast and eyefriendly browsing through the free encyclopedia “Wikipedia”. Gollum gives you access to nearly all Wikipedias in all languages. Further more Gollum gives you some special features which allow you to easily customize your work with Wikipedia.

In my opinion the interface of Wikipedia is too overloaded and confusing. So let’s get an easy to use interface. Gollum, the intuitive way to the powerfull knowledge of Wikipedia. Gollum is based on PHP and Javascript using XMLHttp request for communication, better known as Ajax. That means, there is no need for databases and the code is ready for PHP5. Therefore, the client is only required to use a browser like Firefox, MS Internet Explorer, Netscape or Safari with activated Javascript. Safari has yet to be tested.
Gollum is for free and can be downloaded under the General Public License (GPL). Download will be coming soon!

Heatseek began in 2005 when a few guys wondered why viewing adult content on a computer was so unfriendly to users. We thought, “everyone must be so annoyed at popup windows, friends and spouses finding stuff on their computer, and viewing pics/videos with all these different programs that weren’t designed for this type of material.” Thus, Heatseek was born.

Heatseek can view all standard image and movie formats, including JPG, GIF, WMV, MPEG, and AVI. Most websites use these standard formats for all of their content. Also, any non-standard formats that play in Windows Media Player will also work in Heatseek. So if you have installed a codec to view xVid movies, you can view them in Heatseek too!

Their mission is simple: give consumers the ultimate software for securely obtaining, organizing, and viewing personal content.

The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry has announced that it will file suit against Yahoo! China for copyright infringement under a new law that came into effect in China this weekend. The Federation says that around 90% of all music sold in China is pirated and Yahoo! China includes links to unaffiliated sites selling pirated music.

When Google lost its appeal in a French court last week and was ruled guilty for including search results for counterfeit Louis Vuitton hand bags, most international observers thought it indicated an unrealistic and anti-American sentiment in France. For some reason intellectual property infringement in music is taken far more seriously. Specifically, it indicates a serious misplacement of priorities by US influence wielders. Estimating damages from such practices in the developing world seems unrealistic, as it’s hard to imagine that most pirated goods would be bought at full market value if pirated alternatives were unavailable.

Of all the laws to change in China, what a shame this is the one that international influence worked its power on. What will Yahoo! Music do? They weren’t willing to challenge Chinese law on human rights, will they do so when it comes to search results and listings? If it makes sense for Yahoo! to change their practices in China, does it make sense for Google to change its practices in France? What does this mean for search? We’ll just have to wait and see.

StumbleUpon is a social browsing application. Users download a browser toolbar and can find popular sites in different categories, vote on sites, etc. Stumbleupon has nearly 1 million registered users in 139 countries, who “stumble” 2.2 million sites er day. Advertisers can get their ads in front of a targeted audience for 5 cents an impression. I use this service.

StumbleUpon is an intelligent browsing tool for sharing and discovering great websites. As you click “Stumble!”, you’ll get high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended (rated I like it) by friends and other StumbleUpon’s members with similar interests. Rating these sites shares them with your friends and peers – you will automatically ‘stumble upon‘ each others’ favorites sites.

bsSvnBrowser is a Ruby on Rails Subversion Browser. Subversion is an open-source revision control system, more information found at subversion.tigris.org. The developers have made heavy use of “AJAX” technology to give it that live application-like feel.

bsSvnBrowser is the browser created by and for Bounty Source (giving it the “bs” in bsSvnBrowser).

Google Checkout launched early this morning and may significantly change the online shopping sector. The system offers low transaction costs for merchants and mediation between buyers and sellers online in exchange for access to what will be a huge amount of data about shopping and sales conversions. There doesn’t appear to be many benefits for buyers in the system. There are $10 discounts at many participating stores, but in order to accept a new system like this, certainly, we would need features that beat what’s already available.

Not a stored value system like PayPal, Google Checkout is more like a unified shopping identity for buyers who can give their credit card number to just one company (Google) and limit email contact received later from places they shop online. The Google Checkout site is in its infancy, with only about 100 stores listed as participating at the program’s inception and few variant URLs that redirect yet to the program page. The program, though high profile in the media, is described on its page almost entirely in terms of its benefits to sellers. The system is limited to sellers in the US, many people were hoping that it would be available in more countries than PayPal is.

AdWords participants will gain extra benefits, with a $10 credit in Google Checkout fees for every $1 they spend on advertising with Google. Transaction fees are remarkably low, roughly 2/3 of PayPal’s basic rates. The service’s pricing structure may ultimately be profitable enough for Google, but the major strategy here could be to access shopping data. The biggest question then appears to be whether consumers trust the Google brand enough to look to the company for more than just access to the rest of the world’s data, but as a repository for our own data kept private from a world of online shopping vendors. The benefits over PayPal seem clear for sellers, but whether consumers will react favorably is a question we’ll have to wait to be answered.