MarketingVOX: A hearing in federal court in Arkansas is scheduled today to consider a proposed settlement of a class-action suit against Google related to click fraud.

A federal judge will decide whether to approve Google's offer to settle, for $90 million, a click fraud class-action lawsuit brought by Lane's Gifts and Collectibles, but more than 50 objections have been filed against the proposal, writes MediaPost. Attorneys' fees would total $30 million, and advertisers would receive $60 million in ad credits, according to the proposed settlement.

Among the settlement terms was that a third-party expert be allowed to examine Google's click-fraud detection methods - and that expert, professor of information systems at NYU Alexander Tuzhilin has now issued a report (pdf) concluding that Google's current efforts are "reasonable," writes ClickZ. He notes, however, that before March 2005 Google's policies allowed some questionable practices, such as charging advertisers for one click as well as another immediately following it.

"The bottom-line conclusion of the report is that Google's efforts against click fraud are in fact reasonable," Reuters reports a post on Google's official blog as saying. "It is an independent report, so not surprisingly there are other aspects of it with which we don't fully agree."

MediaPost points out an inherent problem in click-fraud detection: whereas advertisers want more information on detection and how clicks are counted, "if Google discloses this information, it opens itself to click fraud on a massive scale because, by doing so, it provides certain hints about how its invalid click detection methods work," according to Tuzhilin's report.

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