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A comment on I Spent $6M on Google Ads Last Year. Parent comment

Re:I Spent $6M on Google Ads Last Year by rsp1984 on Monday April 27, 2020 @05:10PM (#23000053)
Sorry for my ignorance, but wouldn't that be an indication of, you know, fraud? And if it were, would it even matter if it were Google's bots or someone else's?

I never really understood how Google could ever guarantee that ad clicks are real and not fake, as any sufficiently sophisticated robot will have click patterns that are indistinguishable from humans. I bet designing such sophisticated robots is an industry on its own.

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Re:I Spent $6M on Google Ads Last Year by alexpetralia on Monday April 27, 2020 @05:41PM (#23000440)
I suspect this would be easily gamed by careful experimenters.

For example, could you build a page that bots could navigate to, but would be really obscure for a person? Would that generate a substantial amount of clicks? Sure, the bots could adapt (i.e. not click on obscure pages), but that would take time to learn, and until then, they would screw up and fall into the honeypot.

If that has ever happened in the history of Google, you'd think someone would have publicized it.

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