when emerging technologies such as search engine marketing (sem) face tasks that require human level intelligence, it is inevitable to use the knowledge repositories to endow the machine with the breadth of knowledge available to humans. keyword suggestion for search engine advertising is an important problem for sponsored search and sem that requires a goldmine repository of knowledge. a recen...

In the Trading Agent Competition Ad Auctions Game, agents compete to sell products by bidding to have their ads shown in a search engine’s sponsored search results. We report on the winning agent from the first (2009) competition, TacTex. TacTex operates by estimating the full game state from limited information, using these estimates to make predictions, and then optimizing its actions (daily ...

My Ph.D. thesis focuses on the design of economic mechanisms inspired by sponsored search auctions to support new generation search engines. These engines (called integrators) are based on multi-domain queries and on the federation of multiple domain-specific search engines. The problem studied in my thesis is essentially a mechanism design problem where two levels are present: in the first, th...

Given the growing importance of search in online travel planning, marketers need to better understand the behavioural aspect of search engines use. Built upon a number of previous studies, the goal of this research is to identify patterns in online travel queries across tourist destinations. Utilizing transaction log files from a number of search engines, the analysis shows important patterns i...

We study the impact of changes in the position of competing listings in organic search results on the performance of sponsored search advertisements. Using data for several keywords from an online retailer’s ad campaign, we measure the impact of organic competition on both click-through rate and conversion rate of sponsored search ads for these keywords. We find that changes in the position of ...

Sponsored search accounts for 40% of the total online advertising market. These ads appear as ordered lists along with the organic (regular) search results in search engine results pages. There is conflicting evidence regarding the impact of organic search results on the sponsored search especially when there is an overlap in the results. We evaluate the impact of advertiser’s link as well as t...

Sponsored-search mechanisms, where advertisers bid for better placement in the listing of search results on Yahoo! and Google, 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. This provides an unprecedented opportunity to extend the research relating quality a...

We characterize the optimal (revenue maximizing) auction for sponsored search advertising. We show that a search engine’s optimal reserve price is independent of the number of bidders. Using simulations, we consider the changes that result from a search engine’s choice of reserve price and from changes in the number of participating advertisers.

Given the growing importance of online search in travel planning, marketers need to better understand the behavioural aspect of travel planning using search engines. The goal of this study is to identify patterns in online travel-related queries across tourist destinations. Utilizing transaction log files from a number of search engines, the analysis indicates both commonalities and differences...

We examine prior and current sponsored search auctions and find evidence of strategic bidder behavior. Between June 15, 2002, and June 14, 2003, we estimate that Overture’s revenue from sponsored search could have been more than 60% higher if it had been able to prevent this strategic behavior. We also show that advertisers’ strategic behavior has not disappeared over time; rather, such behavio...