An Incentive-Compatible Revenue-Sharing Mechanism for the Economic Sustainability of Multi-domain Search Based on Advertising

Multi–domain search engines decompose complex queries addressing several issues at a time into sub–queries, and forwards them to one or more domain–specific content providers, typically implemented as Web services. This enables complex searches (e.g., vacation planning, composed of a hotel, flight, and car search), and allows users to receive aggregated and high quality results from a variety of sources. We focus on the design of a revenue sharing mechanism for multi–domain search, considering the general setting in which different actors (content providers, advertising providers, hybrid content+advertising providers, and content integrators) are involved in the search results generation. The design of such a mechanism is paramount for the economic sustainability of multi–domain search. Our revenue sharing mechanism extends the existing sponsored search auctions by supporting heterogeneous participants and allowing the redistribution of monetary values to the different actors.