09
May
2006
|
17:04 PM
America/Los_Angeles

Google Media Day: What questions would you ask?



Wednesday morning will come very quickly, I will be up, bright and bleary eyed, a little too early for my normal work schedule, because it is Google media day.

[I sometimes joke that crypt-space is a lot cheaper than crib-space especially in SF...]


I'll be there at the Googleplex in Mountain View, which is a stone's throw from San Jose, the US city with the lowest murder rate because everyone is very sleepy.


I'll be up and active with the best of the San Jose-ians because Google is a fascinating, mesmerizing company. And I want to ask Larry, Sergey, and Eric Schmidt, some tough questions. But before I go, please let me know what you would like to ask them.


Click fraud is one question that I'm sure GOOG will need to reckon with. I will certainly bring it up. And you know what? I bet click fraud is a lot worse than anyone is admitting. Because you can mask any internet address, it is so easy, only the obvious amateurish click fraud gets caught and counted.


But I think GOOG, YHOO and maybe even MSFT can beat click fraud. Especially GOOG because it has its web server analytics software already installed on huge numbers of web sites.


That means it can track clicks and traffic in a myriad of detailed ways. It has the means to not only avoid attempts by search engine optimization companies to trick its spiderbots into recognizing a site as being more important than it is, but it can also track a lot of traffic, where it originates and where it goes next.


If Google can track where the traffic originates by means of its resident web analytics software--combined with its spiderbots roaming the Internet--then it could be streets ahead of its competition in weeding out click fraud. (There is one another company that is better positioned to tracking IP traffic: VeriSign [VRSN]--I will reveal its secret business strategy in a future post . . . ;-)


In the meantime, let me know what questions you'd like to ask Eric and the team.