Several posts during the past week touched on the issue of search and search-based advertising. Search-based advertising is one of the most lucrative markets in the IT industry and the primary source of Google’s revenue. There are two main reasons why Google maintains such a large lead in the market: quality of search results and relevance of displayed ads. Accordingly, improving these two areas are the primary approaches Google’s competitors (e.g., Microsoft and Yahoo) can take to increase the value of their search-based ads to advertisers.

PageRank is the original ranking method introduced by Google back in 1998. A description of the details of PageRank is linked to from a recent post by jmholloway. It should be noted that all search engines nowadays most likely incorporate some kind of link analysis in their ranking algorithms. Furthermore, all search engines almost certainly also use much more sophisticated methods. For instance, unlike HITS, PageRank is query independent. Obviously, issuing different queries to Google yields different search results, which already indicates Google must be doing something more than vanilla PageRank.

A post by bogus6541 discusses a new approach Microsoft is taking in the battle for search quality superiority. While the link provided by bogus6541 seems to have expired, one can find a similar article here. In short, Microsoft is hoping to leverage search history to improve the personal search results for each individual user.

As discussed in class, Google has devised a relatively successful auction framework to see ads, though, as viralcat notes, it still has notable flaws. Recent posts by proneax and cosmohr discuss Google’s next objective in upgrading its advertising service to a cost per action model as opposed to the current cost per click model. Coupled with this transition is an effort to show less more but relevant ads to users. Google hopes that these two strategies will combine to collectively make ads more relevant to users and more valuable to advertisers.

Both therebelking and cloud7 wrote posts discussing Yahoo’s new advertising technology, Panama. Yahoo has lagged behind Microsoft and Google in recent years and Panama is Yahoo’s solution to provide more and relevant search-based advertisement.

Only time will tell how Google will fare in the face of stiffer competition as we enter this next generation of search and advertising technology.