A Survey of Sponsored Search Advertising in Large Commercial Search Engines

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A Survey of Sponsored Search Advertising in Large Commercial Search 
Engines"

by

Mr. George Trimponias


Abstract:

Large commercial search engines such as Google Search, Yahoo! Search, and 
Microsoft’s Bing have recently emerged as information gateways for 
millions of Internet users. Their unique role as an intermediary between 
Internet users and the vast Web content has created exciting marketing 
opportunities for many commercial firms that wish to advertise their 
product or service. As a result, a new multibillion dollar market for 
sponsored search has been established, where advertisers pay a fee 
determined by an auction in order to be displayed in highlighted textual 
content or alongside the Web search results. Motivated by its 
unprecedented proliferation and enormous success, we conduct a survey on 
the newly introduced paradigm of sponsored search advertising. Our 
contributions are twofold. On the one hand, we provide an extensive and 
self-contained survey on the sponsored search market, covering as diverse 
topics as the structure of sponsored search advertising, practical issues 
that major search engines need to deal with, and even a brief history of 
the market for paid links. On the other hand, we investigate several 
auction designs for the sponsored search market, and discuss their 
game-theoretic properties and their structural connections. We conclude 
with future directions and challenges.


Date:                   Monday, 7 November 2011

Time:                   2:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:                  Room 3416
                         lifts 17/18

Committee Members:	Prof. Dimitris Papadias (Supervisor)
                         Prof. Dik-Lun Lee (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lei Chen
 			Dr. Ke Yi


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