Search

Sponsored search has dramatically influenced how people interact with the Web. It has funded the Web searching infrastructure that users have grown accustomed to and provided unparalleled reach, frequency, and control of marketing efforts and advertising campaigns. Sponsored search advertising has dramatically impacted search engines, consumers, and organizations, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

Analysis of data from a major metasearch engine reveals that sponsored-link click-through rates appear lower than previously reported. Combining sponsored and nonsponsored links in a single listing, while providing some benefits to users, does not appear to increase clicks on sponsored listings. In a competitive market, rivals continually strive to improve their information-retrieval capabilities and increase their financial returns. One innovation is sponsored search, an "economics meets search" model in which content providers pay search engines for user traffic going from the search engine to their Web sites. Sponsored search has proven to be a successful business model for Web search engines, advertisers, and online vendors, as well as an effective way to deliver content to searchers. The "impact of sponsored search" sidebar describes some of the model's notable benefits.

With paid search, the content provider, search engine, and user have mutually supporting goals. With paid or sponsored search, content providers pay Web search engines to display sponsored links in response to user queries alongside the algorithmic links, also known as organic or nonsponsored links

The Web has become a worldwide source of information and a mainstream business tool. Are human information needs and searching behaviors evolving along with Web content? As part of a body of research studying this question, we have analyzed three data sets culled from more than one million queries submitted by more than 200,000 users of the Excite Web search engine, collected in September 1997, December 1999, and May 2001. This longitudinal benchmark study shows that public Web searching is evolving in certain directions. Specifically, search topics have shifted from entertainment and sex to commerce and people, but there is little change in query lengths or frequency per user. Search topics have shifted, but there is little change in user search behaviors.

Google, Yahoo!, and other companies vying for a piece of the lucrative search-engine market continue to transform the sponsored-search model, linking results to other information media such as telephones and TV. However, click fraud undermines this process by reducing the value of Web site traffic to content providers and thereby decreasing revenue for the search engines. Threats to the search engines' underlying business model are also threats to the free search services that these companies provide to millions of users, making click fraud a concern for all.