BlowSearch Takes Aim at Click Fraud

BlowSearch is a metasearch engine with a mission: to reduce the amount of automated click fraud on the Web, and make itself a strong midmarket search contender in the bargain.

Joe Holcomb, marketing vice president for the Brooklyn, NY outfit, maintains that the level of fraudulent clicks in search marketing may be as high as 35% — quite a bit above the 20% posited by other industry experts. And while some of that may come from competitors trying to blow out a rival’s ad budget, Holcomb says as much as 99% of click fraud is the work of unscrupulous affiliates lining their pockets with clickthrough fees, usually using automated software to click on ads on their own sites.

BlowSearch claims its Click Defender technology, which went into beta test across its publisher network in April, will eliminate the threat of these bogus clicks. “We’ve identified between 18 and 20 different points of computer information that are passed back and forth between your machine and our servers when you click a link,” says BlowSearch chief operating officer Rick Kahn. “A lot of those can be replicated in script so software can look like a real person clicking. But we’ve identified combinational pairs between those points that can’t be mimicked, and that’s what we rely on.”

Holcomb and Kahn note that Click Defender can tell in real time whether a click comes from a human or a machine. “It’s what I call ‘on-the-click’ software,” Holcomb says.

BlowSearch helps advertisers contend with the problem of click fraud by rivals with its Competitor IP Blocking tool. This allows advertisers to enter any IP address into their systems that they consider abusive to their ads. Those ads will then not be served to that address.

Holcomb has made himself something of a lightning rod by asserting that the search industry generally has been slow to confront the click fraud problem because it stands to lose too much by doing so. The major pay-per-click engines are interested in “effectively managing” fraudulent traffic but not necessarily eliminating it, he has written.

“If click fraud is as prevalent across all systems as I believe it to be, that would mean Google’s revenue would take an immediate hit of 30% to 35%,” he says. “Talk about a wake-up call for your investors.”