Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Sponsored Search Panel Discussion

The last Electronic Commerce conference in June had a workshop on sponsored search. Sponsored search are those ads you see when you run a Google or Yahoo search. People bid on keywords to position their ads and how to model and run these auctions is an exciting question both theoretically and practically.

The workshop had a panel discussion "Models for Sponsored Search: What are the Right Questions?" organized by Rakesh Vohra and yours truly. Panelists were Kamal Jain (Microsoft), David Pennock (Yahoo!), Michael Schwarz (Yahoo, UC Berkeley) and Rakesh Vohra (Kellogg School at Northwestern). The panel was moderated by Jason Hartline.

Jason recorded the discussion which I converted to MP3 (98 minutes, 17 MB).

Alternatively you can read the transcript (PDF, postscript). Thanks to Nina Balcan, Jianqing Chen, Nikhil Devanur, and Anuj Kumar for their hard work transcribing the audio.

8 comments:

  1. It's great that you make such valuable discussions available. (I have not yet listened, but I sure will). Why are more conference presentations not video-taped or audio-recorded?

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  2. What's the point has a discussion of "search" without "google"? Seriously, how often the readers here use MSN search or Yahoo search?

    I love the content of Yahoo! though.

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  3. If you plug in "search engine market share" into your favorite search engine you'd find an answer, not to your question, but the the relevant question.

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  4. My guess, though I could be wrong & you'd have to ask Jason to be sure, is that Google reps were invited but declined.

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  5. Jason, may not be following this blog so I will drop him an email to confirm.

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  6. Yes, a Google researcher was invited to the panel (but declined due to scheduling constraints).

    --Jason

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  7. I wish if Google could raise its participation in scientific conferences.

    There is a huge talent out there and the scientific community could benefit a lot.

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  8. An outsider's perspective:

    It seems Google is making steps to become more involved. For instance, they are calling some of their employes researchers and they are participating more in conferences. For instance, they had at least four people attending the Second Bay Algorithmic Game Theory Symposium (last Friday) and one of them presented some material in the open problems session. I would be inclined to think that the very fact that relevant research is going on in the academic community without them (as is implicated by the success of the recent sponsored search auction workshop and panel discussion) would help to encourage them to become more involved.

    --Jason

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