Last week, Melissa Lafsky cited some statistics on the rampant growth of click fraud and then punctuated the absurdity of the situation by questioning, rhetorically, whether everyone on the Internet is now a criminal for clicking with unlawful intent. Just who made it a fraud to click on a link, anyway? But to people whose immense fortunes are tied to sorting out honest clicks from false clicks, click fraud isn’t absurd at all. So after a flurry of comments about the piece, Lafsky clarified her position in a follow-on post.

Happily, Google’s got click interpretation down to a science, so we’re all off the hook (although the algorithm apparently still struggles with interpreting wit, sarcasm, irony, rhetoric, and French). So now I’m anxiously anticipating the beta of Google Intentions: an app for searching everyone’s click streams, categorized by intent!