Google acquires Spider.io to weed out fraud online ads

Google has reportedly purchased Spider.io to identify and stop online ad frauds.

The London-based startup specializes in weeding out fraudulent clicks around online ads.

According to Tech Crucnh, Spider.io has tech that would help Google identify bad behavior around their content in video and display ads on the web, to help them get a more accurate picture of what is and isn't succeeding.

With so much of online ad frauds existing on search giants, marketers are concerned about their content's intended reach and whether the results people see are based on actual interest.

Although the terms of the deal haven't been disclosed, the three-year-old company is only seven strong and has impressive ranks, including three PhDs and an ex-Yahoo natural language processing and artificial intelligence expert.

The report said that Spider.io's tech is designed specifically to detect attacks originating from PCs infected by malware, which are often programmed by attackers to place a high volume of ad requests, thus skewing the numbers and defrauding online advertisers out of millions of dollars.