Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Microsoft Research India, and the University of Texas at Austin have developed ViceROI, an algorithm designed to catch click-spam in search ad networks. "We designed ViceROI based on the intuition that click-spam is a profit-making business that needs to deliver higher return on investment--ROI--for click-spammers than other ethical business models in order to offset the downside risk of getting caught," says UCSD's Vacha Dave. Until now, ad networks normally responded to click-spam reactively. However, the lack of transparency often led to click-spam not being uncovered for years at a time. During testing, ViceROI flagged several hundred publishers that were resorting to click-spam of various sorts. "The ViceROI approach flags click-spam through all these mechanisms and ... is resilient against click-spammers using larger botnets over time," the researchers say in their paper. They also point out that the approach is now "ranked among the best existing filters deployed by the ad-network today while being far more general." To read further, please visit http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/countering_click_spam