After more than 20 years of being a PC user )including all versions of Windows and MS-DOS before that(, I switched over to a MacBook Pro last October. It was not an easy adjustment, and I seriously considered going back to my Thinkpad. Fortunately, I made it past that stage, love it now, and can't imagine ever using Windows )which needed to meditate for two minutes before even turning off( as my primary operating system again. Nonetheless, the first few weeks were rough,

Here's a great video of the 70-minute talk the head of our Ad Traffic Quality engineering team gave at Carnegie Mellon in October. YouTube - Click Fraud: Anecdotes from the Front Line .

It's great to hear that Yahoo will soon be adding this report . I hope that every PPC ad network will provide a feature like this, and was glad when Microsoft added it last year . For details on how to use this feature on Google AdWords, see our blog post .

Is now up: Google Privacy Center . Google Blog Post: Privacy Made Easier .

Another post in our uses of data series, this time from Paul and Steve from Search Quality on how we comb through massive logs to build models which deliver relevant search results. Making search better in Catalonia, Estonia, and everywhere else .

Here are a number of resources we posted this week, including a family safety guide and video. Official Google Blog: A common sense approach to Internet safety .

This post includes a simple example of analyzing IP distributions. Official Google Blog: Using data to help prevent fraud .

F air Isaac is one of the leading fraud detection companies in the world, and is an organization I have a great deal of respect for. I have spoken with them in the past, and they told us they have been trying to determine if click fraud detection might be a viable business for them. At Google, we're very happy to see organizations with scientific backgrounds in anomaly detection getting into this space and conducting research.

T he Click Quality Council is a group of advertisers which meets regularly to discuss click fraud. A few days ago they came out with their "Cornerstone Principles for Pay-Per-Click Quality Improvement" eight requests from advertisers, similar to Jeffrey Rohrs' Sausage Manifesto, which also collected and presented advertiser requests in January. I thought folks might be interested in where Google stands on some of their requests. Overall,

O ne question I frequently get asked by some of our more advanced advertisers is "what is Google doing about click fraud from botnets?" Analyzing botnets is an important activity in both our Click Quality and Security Teams. Yesterday, Dr. Neil Daswani , a member of both teams, presented a paper at the HotBots 2007 workshop on a case study of one such botnet we examined last year called Clickbot.A.

R eaders of this blog know that click fraud is an issue we take very seriously at Google. We throw out a significant percentage of ad clicks )on average in the single digits( every day to protect our advertisers. Because of our investment in click fraud protection systems, we are able to manage this issue very well and prevent it from having an impact on the vast majority of AdWords advertisers. However, click fraud is real,

I n part 1 , I wrote about the recent press releases from click fraud consulting firms on industry click fraud rates. In this post, I'd like to follow up on some of the issues we covered in our August report, "How Fictitious Clicks Occur in Third-Party Click Fraud Audit Reports" , and explain why click fraud firms are still making egregious mistakes in )a( click counting, and even more egregious mistakes in )b( click fraud estimation. To begin,

I want to thank everyone who has written to me with questions since I started blogging about the work we do at Google to protect advertisers against click fraud. I'll be catching up on some of those questions in the next week, but today I want to address some of the more recent items in the media on click fraud rates. There was a press release yesterday from ClickForensics stating that their quarterly measure of click fraud for Q4 was 14.2%.

I was tagged by Joe Duck in the blog tag game ) Technorati (, and while I haven't generally written much about myself, I'm happy to share a few details. Here are five things about me which most people probably don't know. #1 It's shumans.com because shuman.com was taken I was unsuccessful in several attempts to acquire shuman.com while it was sitting unused with a company called NetIdentity . If you browse through the links on NetIdentity's home page,

T ime's annual Person of the Year )POTY( issue is coming out on Monday, and guess what. It's me. Well, me, you, and apparently, everyone else in the world. This year's POTY is "You" , complete with a mirrored cover to let you look at yourself and contemplate what you'll do next. After receiving this honor, I had to ask myself )and you should too(, are we worthy?

I was interviewed earlier this week by Gord Hotchkiss , president of Enquiro, for an article on MediaPost's Search Insider about click fraud. "The Elusive Click Fraud Issue: Google's Side Of The Story" provides a look at some of the major issues in this area, and has a bunch of useful information for anyone interested in really understanding click fraud and how we manage it at Google.

Y esterday, Andy Beal posted a detailed story on Google and click fraud, in which I was quoted as saying that Google's click fraud rate is less than 2%. Did I really say that? Not quite. First, some background. Andy and I met during the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago last week, and we spent an hour talking about our systems, methods, and policies for fighting click fraud. As everyone who has ever spoken to me about this knows by now,

T his past weekend I picked up a Samsung BlackJack to replace my Treo. The BlackJack promised a significantly slimmer form factor, faster connection speeds, and well, better style than the blocky, toy-like Treo. I wasn't disappointed in any of these areas, but the real surprise to me was the fact that I did not miss the Treo's stylus at all. A stylus seems like such a good idea, especially in a mobile device.

D espite a reported $150MM budget, a new concept, and a brand new Bond, Casino Royale was relegated to #2 at the box office in its opening weekend. Not that this is such a bad result. #1 was an animated children's movie, Happy Feet, just the type of juggernaut which is so difficult to derail near the holidays. The new James Bond movie is actually terrific. As covered in many reviews, Craig brings an intensity, urgency,

N ow that Google has completed its acquisition of YouTube , I'd like to restart my blog and also join everyone in welcoming the YouTube folks. I've been a big fan and heavy user of YouTube since its launch. YouTube, along with Google Video, pioneered a new way to experience video content. This experience has a few defining attributes, including user-uploaded content, a search-based interface, a wide variety of short video clips, and most importantly, an embedded,