Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Looks like one of the Fools found out about click fraud and kind of goes off on Google about it. The guy greatly exaggerates the state of search result quality and several of his other points. He's obviously taking an extreme point of view in an attempt to garner a lot of attention from bloggers, media, whoever. I'm sure it will work, too. Everyone loves google, so what better way to get some attention that to slam Google. Click fraud is a lot worse at the second tier search engines, and even Yahoo has at LEAST as much click fraud going on (as a percentage), but it's not going to get any attention to bash on Yahoo or Ah-ha. You gotta go after the big lug that everyone loves--in this case, Google.

All the hype aside, the guy may have a point about the click fraud issue. I've been a long time believer that the search engines have a big problem with click fraud and they're in a state of denial because they're afraid of how much revenue it would cost them if they cut it out completely. I believe they do the best they can to combat click fraud, but they have to know a lot of it goes on undetected. Can the pinheads at Google, Yahoo and MSN catch up to the fraudsters or even get ahead of them someday? I have my doubts...