Not that long ago, a blogger on ZDNet kicked up a fuss over CEO Eric Schmidt's supposedly laissez-faire attitude towards click fraud. Just as Google has quieted that kerfuffle down, claiming Schmidt's comments were taken out of context, there is more evidence that Google isn't taking the problem of click fraud as seriously as it could. (Click fraud occurs when publishers who carry Google's ads find ways to generate clicks on those ads that don't come from actual readers; since Google's advertisers pay per click, the money from those fraudulent clicks comes out of advertisers' pockets and goes into Google's.)

Here's the latest evidence that Google would rather argue about click fraud than tackle it. The company has come out with a study, PC Pro reports, that takes apart independent researchers' click-fraud analyses and concludes that they overstate the problem, counting some legitimate clicks as fraudulent.

Fair enough. But if I were a Google advertiser, I'd want to know what Google is doing about the remaining click fraud, not about problems with third-party research. By touting this study, Google is continuing to create the impression that it would rather win an academic argument than please its advertisers.