Contextual advertising is a type of Web advertising, which, given the URL of a Web page, aims to embed into the page the most relevant textual ads available. For static pages that are displayed repeatedly, the matching of ads can be based on prior analysis of their entire content; however, often ads need to be matched to new or dynamically created pages that cannot be processed ahead of time. Analyzing the entire content of such pages on-the-fly entails prohibitive communication and latency costs. To solve the three-horned dilemma of either low relevance or high latency or high load, we propose to use text summarization techniques paired with external knowledge (exogenous to the page) to craft short page summaries in real time. Empirical evaluation proves that matching ads on the basis of such summaries does not sacrifice relevance, and is competitive with matching based on the entire page content. Specifically, we found that analyzing a carefully selected 6% fraction of the page text can sacrifice only 1%--3% in ad relevance. Furthermore, our summaries are fully compatible with the standard JavaScript mechanisms used for ad placement: they can be produced at ad-display time by simple additions to the usual script, and they only add 500--600 bytes to the usual request. We also compared our summarization approach, which is based on structural properties of the HTML content of the page, with a more principled one based on one of the standard text summarization tools (MEAD), and found their performance to be comparable.

Sponsored search systems are tasked with matching queries

We propose a methodology for building a robust query classification system that can identify thousands of query classes, while dealing in real time with the query volume of a commercial Web search engine. We use a pseudo relevance feedback technique: given a query, we determine its topic by classifying the Web search results retrieved by the query. Motivated by the needs of search advertising, we primarily focus on rare queries, which are the hardest from the point of view of machine learning, yet in aggregate account for a considerable fraction of search engine traffic. Empirical evaluation confirms that our methodology yields a considerably higher classification accuracy than previously reported. We believe that the proposed methodology will lead to better matching of online ads to rare queries and overall to a better user experience.

The business of Web search, a $10 billion industry, relies heavily on sponsored search, whereas a few carefully-selected paid advertisements are displayed alongside algorithmic search results. A key technical challenge in sponsored search is to select ads that are relevant for the user's query. Identifying relevant ads is challenging because queries are usually very short, and because users, consciously or not, choose terms intended to lead to optimal Web search results and not to optimal ads. Furthermore, the ads themselves are short and usually formulated to capture the reader's attention rather than to facilitate query matching.

The primary business model behind Web search is based on textual advertising, where contextually relevant ads are displayed alongside search results. We address the problem of selecting these ads so that they are both relevant to the queries and profitable to the search engine, showing that optimizing ad relevance and revenue is not equivalent. Selecting the best ads that satisfy these constraints also naturally incurs high computational costs, and time constraints can lead to reduced relevance and profitability. We propose a novel two-stage approach, which conducts most of the analysis ahead of time. An offine preprocessing phase leverages additional knowledge that is impractical to use in real time, and rewrites frequent queries in a way that subsequently facilitates fast and accurate online matching. Empirical evaluation shows that our method optimized for relevance matches a state-of-the-art method while improving expected revenue. When optimizing for revenue, we see even more substantial improvements in expected revenue.

Contextual Advertising is a type of Web advertising, which, given the URL of a Web page, aims to embed into the page (typically via JavaScript) the most relevant textual ads available. For static pages that are displayed repeatedly, the matching of ads can be based on prior analysis of their entire content; however, ads need to be matched also to new or dynamically created pages that cannot be processed ahead of time. Analyzing the entire body of such pages on-the-fly entails prohibitive communication and latency costs. To solve the three-horned dilemma of either low-relevance or high-latency or high-load, we propose to use text summarization techniques paired with external knowledge (exogenous to the page) to craft short page summaries in real time. Empirical evaluation proves that matching ads on the basis of such summaries does not sacrifice relevance, and is competitive with matching based on the entire page content. Specifically, we found that analyzing a carefully selected 5% fraction of the page text sacrifices only 1%-3% in ad relevance. Furthermore, our summaries are fully compatible with the standard JavaScript mechanisms used for ad placement: they can be produced at ad-display time by simple additions to the usual script, and they only add 500-600 bytes to the usual request.

Contextual advertising or Context Match (CM) refers to the placement of commercial textual advertisements within the content of a generic web page, while Sponsored Search (SS) advertising consists in placing ads on result pages from a web search engine, with ads driven by the originating query. In CM there is usually an intermediary commercial ad-network entity in charge of optimizing the ad selection with the twin goal of increasing revenue (shared between the publisher and the ad-network) and improving the user experience. With these goals in mind it is preferable to have ads relevant to the page content, rather than generic ads. The SS market developed quicker than the CM market, and most textual ads are still characterized by "bid phrases" representing those queries where the advertisers would like to have their ad displayed. Hence, the first technologies for CM have relied on previous solutions for SS, by simply extracting one or more phrases from the given page content, and displaying ads corresponding to searches on these phrases, in a purely syntactic approach. However, due to the vagaries of phrase extraction, and the lack of context, this approach leads to many irrelevant ads. To overcome this problem, we propose a system for contextual ad matching based on a combination of semantic and syntactic features.