http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=57492
From lectures, we learn about the keyword-based advertising that Google and other search engines have. This way of advertising turns out to make $10-$20 billion per year, creating a massive market that companies fight over through an auction called the Generalized Second Price auction. This auction follows the idea of second-price sealed-bid auction for multiple […]

http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-1024234.html
The above url links to a 2003 article from CNET news about Google’s caching feature.  When you query a search item through google, besides being able to click on the main link there is also a link labeled “cached,” which directs the user to a cached version of the website they wish to visit. Google introduced […]

Its a question that pops up from time to time in newspaper articles (e.g. this BBC article ) and technology magazines: are we too connected? In other words, with the ever present cellphone at our collective sides are we too easy to reach? The worry is that as the number of networks we join increases, […]

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/econ_ostrovsky_internetauction.shtml
Stanford economists say that under Google’s current auction system, inexperienced bidders often end up overpaying, while experienced ones funnel personnel and money that could be used for growing the company into instead figuring out how to beat Google’s system.
The problem is that Google says it is conducting a second-price auction using ideas from […]

Every holiday season, I resort to doing the bulk of my shopping online because of the convenience and ease. And like any shopper, I always want to find the best price. I always find that I spend most of my time cross-referencing many online stores and checking the current auction prices on eBay. […]

http://mamma.com/info/about.html
http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html
On March 8th, Mamma.com’s stock soared 27% after it reported earnings of $420,175 on revenues of $3.6 million. This is paltry compared to industry leader Google’s earnings of $997.3 million on over $3 billion in revenues. However, any profitability reported by an internet company is a good sign as most tech companies have […]

Yahoo Search Marketing, formerly known as Overture, which was originally GoTo.com - the first pay-per-click advertiser, launched a new pay-per-click model February 5th.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/08/technology/08yahoo.html?ex=1304740800&en=658529acc1fc013a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Yahoo’s new advertising platform, codenamed Panama, takes both quality and bid-price into account when determining ad ranks. This is nothing new - Google is already doing it. Google’s AdWords […]

If you’ve taken some basic economics, you know that the perfect competitive market equilibrium that economists love so much can be thrown off by a few things, including imperfect information. The exploding popularity of keyword-based advertising fueled by Google is a relatively young and developing marketplace with companies continuing to tweak their strategies and […]

An article over at O’Reilly Radar previews Metaweb’s Freebase, an upcoming product that aims to collect and organize the vast amounts of knowledge available on the web. Like Wikipedia, Freebase empowers users to view and edit its information archive directly. (In fact, Freebase has absorbed much of the content provided in openly available databases such […]

 
Web search algorithms, such as PageRank or HITS, rely on hyperlink analysis to rank the relevance of web pages in the world wide web. As mentioned in class, the principle these algorithms rely on is that the presence of an in-link onto a page indicates a human approval of its content. Consequently, studying […]