"Our website has been promoted via Overture's pay-per-click program for several years," the reader wrote. When Overture added the Content Match contextual advertising feature to his service, he decided to at least give it a try. "It didn't seem like a bad idea, although the number of websites that might mention the kind of items we have to sell would pretty much be restricted to our competitors. So I watched it closely to see how much it was costing us."

The reader's company sells a fairly specialized set of products, so the amount of click-throughs generated by Overture's Content Match were generally not very heavy. "Imagine my surprise when I found that two terms we have pay-per-click campaigns on went from very little action to a huge amount of action - for only two days," the reader wrote. "Over the course of six months, the first product description averaged three or four clicks a day. Then last month it went up to over 700 clicks, with 175 clicks in a two-day period. The second term - which had had just one click-through the previous month - had over 200 last month, most of them beginning in that same two-day period."

The reader contacted Overture to ask if they investigate the rather remarkable click-through rates he had suddenly experienced for those two product descriptions. About a week later, he received a response saying that after reviewing the traffic his website had received, Overture had determined that the click-throughs were valid but would give his account a small credit covering a portion of them. "Please note that although no unqualified clicks were detected on your account, we have issued this credit as a measure of goodwill and appreciation for your business," Overture's message informed him.

"I was unhappy with this response," the reader wrote. "I replied to them asking that they provide me with the website that was responsible for the great number of clicks for both terms on those two days." All he got back was a highly dubious explanation of how the news pages Content Match displays its ads on are too dynamic for Overture to be able say which ones generated his click-throughs. "Which is pure baloney, since Overture pays the sites that display the ads and generate the click-throughs," the reader said. "It would seem impossible to do this unless they were able to track which site and which page on that site generated the clicks."

It also seems highly improbable that any news sites were generating such overwhelming interest in his relatively narrow product category without the reader being aware of them. But the reader can't prove where the clicks came from. "Our server logs show a very high degree of activity in two ranges of IP numbers, but the ranges aren't registered as blocks that I can find," tbe reader said. The reader believes that there was either a search engine glitch or someone - perhaps one of his competitors - found a way to evade Overture's fraud detection to run up some click-throughs on his account. "The gripe I have with Overture is they can't or won't show me any verification that that's not what happened. In the meantime, I've turned their Content Match feature off. But basically I feel we are at the mercy of the search engines' click fraud prevention tools, however inadequate they may be."