Alexander Tuzhilin, a professor of information systems at NYU is one of the rare outsiders who was given the opportunity to review Google’s click fraud detection systems. He came to the conclusion that the company’s effort to combat fraud are reasonable.

The story started in Google and plaintiffs in the Arkansas case, Lane’s Gifts v. Google, of which the former complained about the lack of clickfraud detection mechanism in AdWords.

In March 2006, Google has agreed to a $90 million settlement, but the court is still determining whether to approve or not.

A third party has to be introduced to examine Google’s detetion methods before the court can decide on the settlement. It also tries to uncover if there is a financial reason of not applying click fraud detection.

Before March 2005, when user double-clicked on an ad (clicking two times consecutively), advertisers were charged for both clicks. It is not clear why it took so long to revise the policy for double clicks but it was revised in March 2005.

In the effort to fight click fraud, Google employs around 36 people. A dozen of them are engineers developing technological systems to detect invalid clicks. Despite the simplicity of the methods, they perform reasonably well.

Google also employs manual offline detection systems, although there might be an issue with scalability of these inspection processes, reports Tuzhilin.

So with this positive second opinion, may be this settlement is going to be approved.

Source: ClickZ News.