Output URL bidding is a new bidding mechanism for sponsored search, where advertisers bid on search result URLs, as opposed to keywords in the input query. For example, an advertiser may want his ad to appear whenever the search result includes the sites http://www.imdb.com and en.wikipedia.org, instead of bidding on keywords that lead to these sites, e.g., movie titles, actor names, and so on....

This paper will demonstrate heuristics for solving revenue-maximizing single parameter mechanism design problems. The bidders in each environment will share the same relative valuations for goods, and their utility functions will be linear with respect to what they are allocated. We will apply these heuristics for three auctions: k-Vickrey, sponsored search, and knapsack. Formalizing all of the...

Sponsored search mechanisms, where advertisers bid for better placement in the listing of search results on search services such as Yahoo! and Google integrate the benefits of online search with advertising, and have emerged as the dominant revenue model for online search engines. Interestingly, Yahoo! and Google employ different mechanisms to determine the placement of bidders’ advertisements....

Modern commercial Internet search engines display advertisements along side the search results in response to user queries. Such sponsored search relies on market mechanisms to elicit prices for these advertisements, making use of an auction among advertisers who bid in order to have their ads shown for specific keywords. We present an overview of the current systems for such auctions and also ...

In sponsored search auctions advertisers typically pay a fixed amount per click that their advertisements receive. In particular, the advertiser and the publisher enter into a contract (e.g., the publisher displays the ad; the advertiser pays the publisher 10 cents per click), and each party’s subjective value for such a contract depends on their estimated click-through rates (CTR) for the ad. ...

Understanding the intention underlying users’ queries may help personalize search results and therefore improve user satisfaction. If a commercial intent exists, and if an ad is related to the user’s information need, the user may click on that ad. In this paper, we develop a methodology for using ad clickthrough logs from a commercial search engine to study characteristics of commercial intent...

The recent increase of domain–specific search engines, able to discover information unknown by general–purpose search engines, leads to their federation into a single entity, called federated search engine. In this paper, we focus on how it can effectively merge sponsored search results, provided by the domain–specific search engines, into a unique list. In particular, we discuss the case in wh...

Utilization of search engines services is embedded in many people's daily activities. However, consumers do not pay for these services, they are financed through sponsored search. The prevailing Generalized Second Price (GSP) auction mechanism, which is used by search engine service providers to allocate advertising slots to advertisers, who bid on keywords, only charges advertisers for clicks ...

We initiate the study of an interesting aspect of sponsored search advertising, namely the consequences of broad matcha feature where an ad of an advertiser can be mapped to a broader range of relevant queries, and not necessarily to the particular keyword(s) that ad is associated with. In spite of its unanimously believed importance, this aspect has not been formally studied yet, perhaps becau...

The proliferation of powerful mobile devices with built-in navigational capabilities and the adoption in most metropolitan areas of fast wireless communication protocols have recently created unprecedented opportunities for location-based advertising. In this work, we provide models and investigate the market for location-based sponsored search, where advertisers pay the search engine to be dis...