Online advertising company DoubleClick Inc. said on Wednesday it will launch an exchange to connect buyers and sellers of digital advertisements in the third quarter.

The DoubleClick Advertising Exchange service is currently being tested in the United States and is expected to be available globally by the end of 2007, the company said in a statement.

Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit have been reported to have expressed interest in purchasing DoubleClick, which is majority-owned by San Francisco-based private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman.

With an official YouGov survey in the UK finding that one in 10 Internet users is a victim of some form of online fraud, security experts are warning that online fraud — from phishing to identity theft — can strike any user, regardless of the operating system.

One in 10 Internet users in the United Kingdom was a victim of online fraud last year, according to an official survey of 2,400 people, who were asked about their online surfing habits, level of security protection, and encounters with fraud and theft.
Approximately 6 percent had been hit by fraud while shopping online, 4 percent saw “general fraud,” and 3 percent were victims of crime related to banking and credit cards.

The survey was done by YouGov for Get Safe Online, a group created by law enforcement, private companies, and the government. One of the most notable aspects of the project was the discovery that many users did not take basic steps to protect themselves online, such as installing antispyware software.

About one-fifth of those surveyed said they had replied to spam messages, and 10 percent had clicked on a Web site link within a spam e-mail. About 25 percent said most of their online security passwords were the same, and five percent used the same password for every site.

Google, on Wednesday disclosed data showing that while its pay-per-click Web advertising system is under regular attack from fraudsters, virtually all such tricks are automatically detected, rebuffing critics who say its online ads are a magnet for fraud.

Click fraud can occur when Web site publishers attempt to trick Google’s ad system into counting ads never seen by real users, or when competitors use automated programs to create fake clicks, driving up charges per click and rivals’ ad rates.

Invalid clicks also regularly occur if consumers click on an ad then instantly click the back button to exit the ad. Google discounts both.

Financially, what this means for Google is that its computers automatically reject up to 10 percent of potential advertising billings. At current revenue levels, every percentage point of invalid clicks the company forgoes costs Google $100 million in lost revenue, the product manager said.

Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s product manager for trust and safety, said in an interview that, on average, up to 10 percent of pay-per-click activity is invalid, and in some cases fraudulent, but that its computers automatically detect virtually all such problems, meaning advertisers pay nothing.

The sin of vanity will whisper in your ear, telling you how impressive your stats are. It’s easy to get caught up with the number of hits your Web site has gained or how many referrers you’ve added or even which keywords are most popular. But if you get buried in the numbers and lose sight of your customer, there’s a downside as well.

Pride. Greed. Envy. There are plenty of sins in the Web analytics world, and some of them can even be deadly.
Indeed, while there are any number of little mistakes you could make analyzing your data — like basing important business decisions on hits instead of unique visitors or neglecting the 20 percent of search terms that could be sending droves of visitors through your virtual doors — some mistakes can be downright sinful.

Ultimately, the seven deadly sins of Web analytics violate your corporate goal of optimizing your site to turn online traffic into online sales. If you find yourself in the midst of these seven sins, it’s time to change your ways and set yourself free from the snares of wasted time and money.

Google Inc.’s Blogger service has been generating a steady stream of complaints from users this year, including hours-long outages, feature malfunctions and data loss.

The problems are particularly frustrating to users who migrated to the service’s new version and expected to benefit from its more solid platform.

Users contacted in recent days via e-mail report a variety of problems, including the disappearance of blog entries, an inability to post comments, failed migrations to the new service, kinks with the RSS feature and unresponsiveness by Google to support requests.

For its part, Google says that most bugs are isolated incidents affecting relatively few people at a time and that Blogger’s stability will improve as the migration to the new platform progresses.

“We know how important a service Blogger is to our users, so the highest priority for the Blogger team right now is monitoring the migration to the new platform, listening to feedback from people who’ve migrated, and tackling as fast as we can the little bugs that inevitably pop up here and there in a new product,” says Courtney Hohne, a Google spokeswoman.