I spoke at length yesterday with Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s Business Product Manager, Trust & Safety, about “click fraud.” The opportunity to go beyond formulaic public relations statements yielded interesting tidbits of insight into how Google accounts for valid vs. invalid clicks and on its mechanisms for detecting “fraudsters.” Barry Schnitt, Google spokesperson, was also on the phone.

Google has announced that it will be charging a pay per usage fee of $0.25 per thousand queries of its Adwords API.

A couple of bugs have been reported at the Google AdWords API blog, and web developers using the API should be on the lookout for these issues.

This web analytics expert asks how accurate Google AdWords is and how the company handles possible errors.

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) issued invitations to selected advertisers to participate in the new ContentAds pilot.

Google has added a new feature to AdWords, My Client Center now allows you to configure email alerts. So if you want to be notified of when an ad delivery is stopped, or if your credit card was declined, or if a cmapaign is near ending, or if an account budget is almost done, or if your budget is 80% empty, you can get these alerts prompted to you via email. What about RSS notifications? Well, not yet.

An old saying from the Chinese philosopher and general Sun Tzu could be applied to an alliance between eBay and Google: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Less than a month ago, I mentioned that Technorati had switched from Google Adwords to Yahoo Search Marketing as their ad server of choice on search results pages. At the time, the ads looked like this:

Microsoft has struck deal to become the exclusive provider of web advertising to Facebook, the social networking site, as both companies try to keep up with industry leaders Google and MySpace.

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A dating site for Dutch farmers lost a court case against Google on Thursday after demanding that the world's biggest Internet search engine stop publishing sponsored links to sex sites.