T oday, Web search engines are the primary method for millions of users throughout the world to access information on a topic, navigate to Web sites, keep up with the news, and shop online. Most major search engines generate revenue via sponsored search, a process whereby content providers pay for traffic from specific links the search engine's display in response to user queries. Search engine...

Paid placements on search engines reached sales of over $10 billion in the U.S. last year and represent the most rapidly growing form of online advertising today. In its classic form, a search engine sets up an auction for each search word in which competing web sites bid for their sponsored links to be displayed next to the search results. We model this advertising market focusing on two of it...

Sponsored search, the payment by advertisers for clicks on text-only ads displayed alongside search engine results, has become an important part of the Web. It represents the main source of revenue for large search engines, such as Google; and Microsoft’s Live.com, and sponsored search is receiving a rapidly increasing share of advertising budgets worldwide. At the same time, sponsored search a...

This paper reports findings from a study investigating the effect of integrating sponsored and nonsponsored search engine links into a single web listing. The premise underlying this research is that web searchers are chiefly interested in relevant results. Given the reported negative bias that web searchers have concerning sponsored links, separate listings may be a disservice to web searchers...