A major problem on the internet today is bots or computer robots. These Bots affect major data centers. They add a significant amount of no traffic and it is complete autonomous. All it takes is someone setting up the programs and letting them run by. Major companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook are now working together to attempt to disable or blacklist these bots. Google already has a blacklist of their own in which IP addresses that are suspicious or known to be bots are blocked. Google implemented this back in May and successfully blocked around 9% of the Bot traffic. These annoying Bots attempt to allure users into click on advertisement. These bots are preforming fraud and ends up cost advertisement companies money and breaks the faith in companies that use online marketing. This issue is becoming a significant problem. The TAG group or Trustworthy Accountability Group is joining hands with many major companies to fight against this epidemic. These bots go as far as employing tools that will inflate user clicks. Examples of this would be UrlSpirit and HitLeap. These programs can inflate user click by several thousand clicks for just a single install. If the programs are install thousands of times, it begins to paint a clear picture how large of a problem this is becoming. TAG plans on releasing an ad fraud detection tool later this year.
