Pesco on UCB Search Auction Tech

I’m a Cal guy, so it’s nice to see a write up of some cool UCB tech in the search space. David Pescovitz (disclosure – he’s a BoingBoing pal) covers a new technique in ad optimization. From the piece:

The ideal algorithm would take into account when ranking the advertisers how much budget each advertiser has left. That would not only boost Google’s income but keep competition fierce. The question was how to write an algorithm that did this.

“You want the best ranking algorithm, not just one that keeps advertisers in the auction because it suits the search engine’s purposes,” says Umesh Vazirani, who is also a researcher with the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).

…”The mechanism that we have is much more resilient than traditional methods to this kind of gaming,” Umesh Vazirani says. “For example, if a person has a higher bid but has spent most of his budget, the top ranking may go to the lower bidder.”