A Survey on Sponsored Search Advertising in Large Commercial Search Engines

Large commercial search engines such as Google Search, Microsoft’s Bing, and Yahoo! Search have recently emerged as information gateways for millions of Internet users. Their unique role as an intermediary between Internet users and the vast Web content has created exciting marketing opportunities for many commercial firms that wish to advertise their product or service. As a result, a new multi-billion dollar market for sponsored search has been established, where advertisers pay a fee determined by an auction in order to be displayed in highlighted textual content or alongside the Web search results. Motivated by its unprecedented proliferation and enormous success, we conduct a survey on the newly introduced paradigm of sponsored search advertising. Our contributions are twofold. On the one hand, we provide an extensive and self-contained survey on the sponsored search market, covering as diverse topics as the structure of sponsored search advertising, practical issues that major search engines need to deal with, and even a brief history of the market for paid links. On the other hand, we investigate several auction designs for the sponsored search market, and discuss their properties and mathematical underpinnings. We conclude with future directions and challenges. Technical Report HKUST-CS13-03