• Search Engine Land, Friday, March 23, 2007 11 AM

If you've listened to Yahoo chief Terry Semel recently, you know Yahoo Search's switch to Panama, the search advertising system designed to bring in more money for Yahoo and make text ads more relevant for advertisers, has gone swimmingly. Given his renewed love affair with both his ad customers and search in general, Semel and Yahoo are making a PR blast about its new efforts to curb click fraud.

Pre-empting the new standards to be laid out jointly by the IAB and Yahoo's search engine cousins, the Web giant has appointed a new vice president of marketplace quality -- Reggie Davis, a former Yahoo attorney. According to the press release, Davis will oversee a new unit dedicated to various advertising customer services, including click fraud, traffic quality and network placement. In the release, Yahoo pegged click fraud on its network to between 12%-15% of clicks-not an insignificant amount.

Click fraud is seen as a bigger PR problem than actual problem for the search engines. But here's a great deal more belief than factual evidence behind that claim, as search engines have mostly kept their numbers to themselves. Third parties (which have a vested interest in reporting high click-fraud) have delivered a wide-range of numbers in respective reports. Search engines benefit monetarily from the problem, so their motives have been questioned. Google, for example, says the problem is overstated, and claims it's doing all it can to stop it.

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