We study how standard auction objectives in sponsored search markets change with refinements in the prediction of the relevance (click-through rates) of ads. We study mechanisms that optimize for a convex combination of efficiency and revenue. We show that the objective function of such a mechanism can only improve with refined (improved) relevance predictions, i.e., the search engine has no di...

This report presents a plan to develop an intelligent Meta search engine,iral. This Meta search engine is aimed to provide comprehensive, efficient andrelevant search results for given queries by combining results from different searchengines. This will provide users to cover a larger database of World Wide Web fortheir queries and to get more relevant search results. On the oth...

In pay-per click sponsored search auctions which are currently extensively used by search engines, the auction for a keyword involves a certain number of advertisers (say k) competing for available slots (say m) to display their ads. This auction is typically conducted for a number of rounds (say T ). There are click probabilities μij associated with each agent-slot pairs. The goal of the searc...

This paper presents a game theoretic analysis of the generalized second price auction that Yahoo operates to sell sponsored search listings on its search engine. We present results that indicate that this auction has a multiplicity of Nash equilibria. We also show that weak dominance arguments do not in general select a unique Nash equilibrium. We then analyze bid data assuming that advertisers...

Click models are an important tool for leveraging user feedback, and are used by commercial search engines for surfacing relevant search results. However, existing click models are lacking in two aspects. First, they do not share information across search results when computing attractiveness. Second, they assume that users interact with the search results sequentially. Based on our analysis of...

Web sites invest significant resources in trying to influence their visibility among online search results. In addition to paying for sponsored links, they invest in methods known as search engine optimization (SEO) that improve the ranking of a site among the search results without improving its quality. We study the economic incentives of Web sites to invest in SEO and its implications on sea...

A Dynamic Model of Sponsored Search Advertising Sponsored search advertising is ascendant— Jupiter Research reports expenditures rose 28% in 2007 to $8.9B and will continue to rise at a 26% CAGR, approaching 1/2 the level of television advertising and making it one of the major advertising trends to a¤ect the marketing landscape. Yet little empirical research exists to explore how the interacti...

Development of the search engine as a major information and marketing channel resulted from innovative technologies that made it capable of presenting rapid, relevant responses to queries. To do this, the search engine compiles an index of web pages of information stored on the World Wide Web, ranks each page according to its incoming links, matches keywords in the query to those in its index, ...

“Social shopping” (or social commerce), combining shopping and social networking, is an application of Web 2.0 in electronic commerce to benefit from users’ social networks. This paper explores the development of the emergent “social shopping” and related perspectives. It incorporates comparisons between social shopping marketing and search engine marketing. For example, search engine marketing...

Recently there is an increase in smaller, domain–specific search engines that scour the deep web finding information that general–purpose engines are unable to discover. These search engines play a crucial role in the new generation of search paradigms where federated search engines (FSEs) integrate search results from heterogeneous sources. In this paper we pose, for the first time, the proble...