This paper analyzes the dynamic e¤ect of sponsored search advertising on quality discovery on the Taobao.com retail platform. A stylized model spells out the dynamic from a theoretical perspective: A new product’s boosted exposure from sponsored search ads could help the platform to infer how well the product converts exposure to sales (the quality measure). Because the platform awards top orga...

A context in sponsored search is additional information about a query, such as the user’s age, gender or location, that can change an advertisement’s relevance or an advertiser’s value for that query. Given a set of contexts, advertiser welfare is maximized if the search engine runs a separate auction for each context; however, due to lack of competition within contexts, this can lead to a sign...

We introduce a novel computational model for single-keyword auctions in sponsored search, which explicitly models externality effects among the advertisers, an aspect that has not been (fully) reflected in the existing models, and is known to be prevalent in the behavior of real advertisers. Our model takes into account both positive and negative correlations between any pair of advertisers, an...

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 ...

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...

Web advertising is one of the major sources of income for numerous search engines, news sites and non-commercial publishers. Textual ads, characterized by Sponsored Search (SS) and Content Match (CM), make up a significant portion of Web advertising. In SS, with limited information about ad contents, given a query, the challenge is to place relevant ads alongside organic search results. Organic...

Online sponsored search has emerged as a dominant business model for majority of search engines and as a popular advertising mechanism for online retailers. However, sponsored search advertising is being negatively impacted by click fraud which involves the intentional clicking on sponsored links with the purpose of gaining undue monetary returns for the search engine or harming a particular ad...

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 advertisements (ads for short). A sponsored search auction for a keyword is typically conducted for a number of rounds (say T). There are click probabilities μij associ...

Online sponsored search has emerged as a dominant business model for majority of search engines and as a popular advertising mechanism for online retailers. However, sponsored search advertising is being negatively impacted by click fraud which involves the intentional clicking on sponsored links with the purpose of gaining undue monetary returns for the search engine or harming a particular ad...

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...