While Google and Yahoo are taking measures to curb pay-per-click fraud, some industry experts say tackling click fraud will take an industry-wide effort among search engines, advertisers and third-party monitoring companies. This piece looks at some publishers who are bringing inventory management in-house to take better control. According to research firm Outsell, advertisers wasted $800 million on click fraud in 2005.

Analyst Greg Sterling gives thumbs up to AOL's relaunched Truveo, which is now a consumer video search destination emphasizing branded content and channels. Truveo CEO Tim Tuttle says it's a site where branded content is presented in an environment favorable and friendly to professional content producers, as opposed to say, YouTube. A big drawback, Sterling says, is that many of Truveo's content partners contractually require that videos be served on their sites, rather than on Truveo. So unlike YouTube, the consumer experience is one where new windows are popping up all over.

It's Friday and as you're winding down -- or not -- on one of the last summer weekends, take a moment to exercise that entrepreneurial muscle and indulge in a little "what if" scenario. What if I went out on my own? For inspiration, Netconcepts president Stephan Spencer updates the story of his teenage daughter Chloe, who has turned her Neopets blog into a nice little part-time business by learning a little SEO and Google AdSense. In the few hours per month she spends to maintain her blog and add new content, Chloe Spencer earns through Google AdSense up to …

Kevin Lee addresses the question of whether negative developments in the overall economy may hurt pay-per-click search spending. Because of search's measurability, it may end up with a proportionally larger share of media spending, he suggests. In fact, if just 10% of the spending from the top three media line items were redirected to SEM, most search budgets would double.

Blogger Brier Dudley spoke to the real estate executive whose company signed the lease for Google's new 7.2-acre Kirkland, Wash. campus. Plans include a huge landscaped deck offering westward views of Lake Washington. The first building is scheduled for occupancy in the first quarter of 2008. The rest are scheduled to be done by June. Amenities include a shower facility in the parking garage.

Lots of noise is being made about online-savvy presidential candidates, but few of the White House contenders are exploiting search terms, a round of experiments on Google's AdWords program suggests. Exceptions include Republicans like Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. On the Democratic side, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama appears to be the only one using AdWords this way, though former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards has purchased keywords in the past.

Blogger Philipp Lenssen shows the full-screen prototype sequence for Google Health, codenamed "Weaver," which is Google's planned health information storage program. What's equally interesting is the accompanying debate about privacy and the implications of Google having access to someone's medical history.

D: All Things Digital's Kara Swisher gives kudos to Yahoo for its lifted ranking this week on the customer satisfaction front. While that's positive news, she notes, the niggling point remains that Yahoo cannot monetize its ad search as well as Google. The state of its search and search-ad business will remain at the center of attention, and she revisits with depth the speculation that Yahoo might offload some of its search and ad business back to Google.

Google could reap a financial boon from the switch it's made in the algorithm determining when ads can run at the top of its search results page. That's the assertion from Barron's Eric Savitz, based on a research note issued Wednesday by JMP Securities analyst William Morrison. In the note, Morrison asserts the new ranking methodology will drive "significant improvements" -- as much as two-times higher -- in click-through rates for queries that now have paid listings in the "north position" that did not have them previously. The end result could drive Google's gross revenue 2%-4% higher, Morrison says.

Retailers appear to be counting on the power of their brand names to bring the customers in. For only one in five retailer Web sites is well optimized, according to a study from Oneupweb called "Once Again ... There's Still Money on the Table," examining SEO efforts of the top 100 retailers as rated by Internet Retailer magazine. Of the remainder, 20% of sites were moderately optimized, 34% were nominally optimized, and 26% were not optimized at all.