From: Dennis [dennis.lipovsky@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, October 15, 2006 9:08 PM
To: Michael Kearns
Subject: Re: Important SSS announcment

Attachments: Combined_Data.xls
I selected names of companies, mostly technology related (Sheet1) and then a few that weren't (Sheet2). The aim was to see if the companies had sponsered search ads for themselves, and if they did where on the right side they were placed. A lot of the companies don't have their website linked to on the sponsered search side, which might not be such a big deal if they show up first in the organic side, but with yahoo the first two sponsered search links are on the top of the page, so it stands to reason that they would have incentive to bid to the top spot. I found it a little interesting that coke had several advertisers, most of the top ones having something to do with coca-cola where pepsi had no real relevant sponsered results. 

There was an oddity for some of the results. For example, with 'Microsoft' the view bids tool lists the 'adcenter.microsoft.com' entry as the top bid but when look at the search results, that ad comes up 5th (and the top 4 don't appear in the view bids tool. I haven't been able to figure out the cause of this, I suspect it probably has to do with match type, where standard matches get ranked higher than advanced matches by some amount. If that is the case, match type is a huge driving factor in position and it would be cheaper to bid for exactly the words you want on standard matching instead of relying on the advanced matching. 

-Dennis


On 10/9/06, Michael Kearns <mkearns@cis.upenn.edu> wrote:

  Sorry, the due date should have been Sun Oct 15 below, not 16.

  > -----Original Message-----
  > From: Michael Kearns [mailto:mkearns@cis.upenn.edu]
  > Sent: Monday, October 09, 2006 11:28 AM 
  > To: 'Michael Kearns'; lipovsky@seas.upenn.edu;
  > gabbard@seas.upenn.edu; hershman@sas.upenn.edu ; 'Dr. Stephen
  > Judd'; 'Jinsong Tan'; zavlanos@seas.upenn.edu;
  > fcsaszar@wharton.upenn.edu; boulos@cis.upenn.edu;
  > kulesza@cis.upenn.edu; 'Jenn Wortman'; kuzman@seas.upenn.edu;
  > qiuye@seas.upenn.edu; danh@seas.upenn.edu; 'Sudipto Guha';
  > 'Sanjeev Khanna'; ouya@seas.upenn.edu;
  > peng.wang@uph.seas.upenn.edu; 'Fernando Pereira';
  > qianliu@seas.upenn.edu; hubertj@ldc.upenn.edu;
  > tanmoy@seas.upenn.edu; 'Eyal Even-Dar';
  > zhuowei@seas.upenn.edu; 'Cheryl Hickey'
  > Subject: Important SSS announcment
  >
  >
  > All --- In order to get the creative juices flowing for 
  > empirical projects,
  > I am giving a little assignment required of all students
  > taking the seminar
  > for credit. I am attaching an update of Kuzman's Script for obtaining
  > Overture
  > price data, which he has kindly modified to give nicely 
  > formatted output.
  > You need to have access to a unix or linux box in order to
  > run it, which
  > I assume you all do.
  >
  > You should all use this script to obtain Overture prices for 
  > some moderately
  >
  > large (say, at least in the dozens) set of phrases of your
  > own choosing.
  > Presumably these phrases will be "related" in some
  > interesting way (e.g. the 
  >
  > names of all 50 states). Please try to present an analysis of
  > the prices,
  > what
  > explains their similarities, differences, rankings, etc. I
  > will give an
  > example
  > in class today to help clarify. I'd like everyone to send me 
  > their brief
  > analysis
  > by this coming Sunday night, Oct 16, for discussion in next Monday's
  > session.
  >
  > Best
  > Prof Kearns
  >