Automatic thesaurus generation is used by search engines for query expansion. The same concept is used by search engine marketing companies to suggest keyword terms to their clients to improve the client’s ratings for different search engines. This paper presents and evaluates a corpus based method to find similar terms. The corpus is generated by scraping websites in different categories. A fe...

Measuring the similarity between documents and queries has been extensively studied in information retrieval. However, there are a growing number of tasks that require computing the similarity between two very short segments of text. These tasks include query reformulation, sponsored search, and image retrieval. Standard text similarity measures perform poorly on such tasks because of data spar...

Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, have revolutionized the way people search for information. Advertisers, eager to take advantage of this great potential for customers, have been bidding to display clickable links to their websites as sponsored search results. This revolution, however, and the ten-billion dollar industry it created have been threatened by the rising number of invalid c...

Search engine logs contain a large amount of click-through data that can be leveraged as soft indicators of relevance. In this paper we address the sponsored search retrieval problem which is to find and rank relevant ads to a search query. We propose a new technique to determine the relevance of an ad document for a search query using click-through data. The method builds on a collaborative fi...

The generalized second-price auction (GSP) is used predominantly for sponsored search by leading search engines like Google, MSN-Live Search and Yahoo!. Previous results showed, in a model where all clicks on an ad gain the advertiser the same benefit, that GSP maximizes the social welfare in equilibrium. In practice, however, the probability that a click will convert to a sale for the advertis...

In this paper, we advance the state-of-the-art in designing ex-post truthful multi-armed bandit (MAB) mechanisms for multi-slot sponsored search auctions (SSA) through two different contributions. First, we prove two important impossibility results which rule out the possibility of an expost monotone MAB allocation rule having sublinear regret with time when the click through rates (CTR) of the...

The auction theory literature has so far focused mostly on the design of mechanisms that takes the revenue or the efficiency as a yardstick. However, scenarios where the capacity, which we define as “the number of bidders the auctioneer wants to have a positive probability of getting the item”, is a fundamental concern are ubiquitous in the information economy. For instance, in sponsored search...

While there is a growing stream of research examining online sponsored search advertising, an important area that has not yet received enough attention is the interplay between pay-per-performance advertising and the quality of the firms who choose to invest in it. Our objective in this work is to explore how the shift from pay-for-exposure to pay-for-performance advertising affects the ability...

To direct online users searching for gynecologic cancer information to accurate content, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) 'Inside Knowledge: Get the Facts About Gynecologic Cancer' campaign sponsored search engine advertisements in English and Spanish. From June 2012 to August 2013, advertisements appeared when US Google users entered search terms related to gynecologic ca...

T paper reports on a large-scale implementation of marketing science models to solve the bidding problem in search engine advertising. In cooperation with the online marketing agency SoQuero, we developed a fully automated bidding decision support system, PROSAD (PRofit Optimizing Search engine ADvertising; see http://www.prosad.de), and implemented it through the agency’s bid management softwa...