The dichotomy of having a Yahoo directory listing has been known for years.

Online advertising is meeting a crossroad in 2007, shifting from a focus on generic keyword targeting and universal search results to a more targeted, behavioral-based model. Page views and traditional SEO will lose focus, and Google is leading the way on all roads at once.

It seems that every time Microsoft releases an update to its Internet Explorer browser, there’s a zero-day exploit waiting to be taken advantage of by hackers and identity thieves the world over.

As I manage quite a few PPC campaigns I always notice the silly and sometimes not so silly mistakes that advertisers make with their PPC programs.

University of Louisville graduate student, Li Ge, has been awarded a $149,923 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to engage in research regarding data mining and click-fraud detection.

IBM has announced that it has teamed up with Circuit City to construct an online replica of the retail store within the virtual world of Second Life. The venture is geared at experimenting with the introduction of virtual worlds and 3-D technology into a cross-platform retail environment.

It seems like the conversation I started about Google’s click fraud rate, has rolled down the hill and picked up some momentum.

The votes are in, and a sizeable percentage of commenters appear to believe that Andy Beal’s exclusive on Google’s click fraud detection process is just telling one side of the story.

It’s amazing just how heated of a subject “click fraud” is. When I published details of my conversation with Google, I made no attempt to cover both sides of the story.

For any of our blog readers who also listen to our weekly segment on Webmaster Radio to keep informed on the latest goings-on in the search engine world you’ll know that Jim Hedger has been promising a big story for the past couple weeks. Well it’s finally out there and as promised, he doesn’t disappoint.

WebmasterRadio.FM has released a fascinating, if not alarming, story series based on the issues of click fraud and terrorist fund raising that is sure to be the subject of many water cooler sessions. As the story unfolds we will know more but here is a snippet that describes the concerns/accusations against the pay per click industry:

Back in November, Google’s business product manager for trust and safety, Shuman Ghosemajumder, declared that click fraud at Google was “on average is in the single digits, quarter over quarter.”

Defying the third-party firms that sell themselves to customers amid claims of greater incidents of click fraud, as much as 20 or 30 percent, a Google executive claimed the actual rate is only about 2 percent.

Who would have though click arbitrage would be a topic worth of being covered by Forbes?

At the end of the SES Chicago show WebmasterRadio.fm held a press conference announcing some jaw dropping information about data being analyzed regarding click fraud being used to fund terrorist organizations as well as organized crime.

BusinessWeek writes about a case where the U.S. Attorney had a slam-dunk case against a developer of click fraud software, yet they dismissed the charges.

Have you ever done something to make an improvement and later regretted it?It would be awesome to be able to go back in time and undo the the thing that were supposed to make an improvement.

ClaimID is a service that lets you manage the information that is linked to you online. The service boasts that users can influence the search engines, and provide more relevant information when others submit search queries for their specific names.

A report published by eMarketer shows that 58% of vacation planners are planning their trips online. Conversely, only 23% of respondents made use of travel agents in their holiday plans.

PodZinger has announced the results of its proprietary research into consumer behavior and online video advertising viewing preferences. The research reveals that not only will viewers tolerate advertisements that appear during their search for online audio and video content, they willingly accept that short ads come with the territory.

As GOOG climbs above $500 per share, as predicted to happen about this time last year before the great January plunge, questions as to just how high Google can get, in terms of stock, search share, and visits, get more intense. Last week, a Citigroup analyst predicted Google would overtake Yahoo in visits by the end of 2007. Hitwise disagrees.