Designing a mechanism to assure the reasonableness and fairness of information stored in databases on WWW

Web counters are usually used for recording the number of times a web page has been visited. Apart from the recording of pageviews, advertisement publishers also use Web counters to count the number of clicks made by potential customers on the Internet ads. As performance-based Internet advertisement pricing models are becoming popular and generally acceptable, there is a need from the perspective of the advertisers to ensure the accuracy of the values recorded by Web counters. This paper describes the idea of a virtual IP, and proposes a mechanism for assuring the reasonableness and fairness of the values of Web counters. The result is an accuracy counter (AC). The AC is a real system. It has been successfully tested in a related class project.