This is very very bad for Google’s stock price
“Billy Hoffman, an engineer at Atlanta company SPI Dynamics unveiled a new, smarter web-crawling application that behaves like a person using a browser, rather than a computer program. “Basically this nullifies any traditional form of forensics,” says Hoffman. The program comes from different internet addresses, simulates different browsers and throttles itself to human-like speeds.”
Currently, it’s hard to tell the difference between a human click and a robot click, but it’s still possible to make a reasonable guess, and cheap as they are, getting banks of low-paid clickers in 3rd world countries is still comparatively pricey.
But the ability to run a crawler that’s indistinguishable from a human blows all of that out the airlock. And if it’s impossible to tell the difference between an automated click and a human, the AdWords value proposition goes away.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70016-0.html?tw=rss.index
