Search Support

Recently, telecommunications regulator OfCom (a UK government organization) “proclaimed” at the end of a long PDF report, perhaps rather naively that a lot of invaluable free information useful to the public is not being seen by its target audience because commercial sites outrank it in the search engine results pages (SERPs). One might say this is simply the way of the world and that OfCom fails to understand how the ranking algorithms of sites such as Google, MSN/Live and Yahoo! actually work.

Of course, almost all search engines are commercial entities and have an inbuilt system that allows any organization or company to address its ranking deficiencies by paying to be placed in the sponsored links section of the SERPs and so reach its target audience quite effectively.

There are certainly economic ramifications and potential consequences in terms of political discussions, educational issues, and social participation of sponsored search, says Bernard Jansen of the College of Information Science and Technology, at University Park, Pennsylvania. Moreover, the business models of the biggest of the search engines relies almost entirely on revenues generated by advertising and such sponsored search results, which are after all another form of advertising based on a dynamic display principle.

In his Editorial for a special issue of the International Journal of Electronic Business, (2008, Vol 6, Issue 2, currently in press) on the subject of sponsored search, Jansen points out that despite its enormous economic impact, there has been very little research undertaken to help explain the phenomenon and to predict its wider effects on society. “Sponsored search is analogous to a dynamic form of data meta-tagging,” explains Jansen, “Content providers develop campaigns of terms and search phrases that they believe are likely to be submitted by searchers and applicable to their web content.”

Jansen highlights several papers from the special issue, including his own lead paper written with colleague Tracy Mullen (Sponsored search: an overview of the concept, history, and technology). In this paper the researcher lay the foundations for a model of the sponsored search process and frame it as an extension of overall information searching.

In Equilibrium analysis of dynamic bidding in sponsored search auctions by Yevgeniy Vorobeychik of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Daniel Reeves of Yahoo! Research, in New York, focused on a more technical aspect of sponsored search. It examined the auction mechanism that makes sponsored search possible and looked at incentives for advertisers.

Don Turnbull and Laura Bright of the University of Texas, Austin, with Advertising academia with sponsored search: an exploratory study examining the effectiveness of Google AdWords at the local and global level, focus on one of the most well-known sponsored search results systems. They present the results of an exploratory study that examined a sponsored search advertising campaign for a major US university’s academic department.

“This paper provides an interesting insight into the use sponsored search for a non-commercial ‘business’,” says Jansen. The goals were to increase awareness of the academic department and recruit potential graduate students. Turnbull and Bright observed an interesting behavioral model in information seeking and suggest that it might be used to select appropriate types of sponsored search advertisements. “The research findings showed little overlap between traditional, commerce-oriented online advertising methods and a general awareness campaign,” the researchers explain.

The paper Navigational behavior and sponsored search advertising by Nico Brooks, Director of Search Strategy, at Atlas, in Greenwood Village, Colorado and Harrison Magun Director of Search Media Operations, North America, for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, in Redmond, Washington, they state that the navigational use of search engines is a distinct behavior related to information seeking. “This behavior is of interest to businesses as navigational searching indicates intent on the part of the customer to visit a website,” they say.

“Given the size of the industry, we can surmise that billions of advertising dollars are being spent on navigation. This behavior pattern does not fit the image of a prospective consumer searching for the right vendor – though performance measurement technology continues to favor this model of behavior,” Brooks and Magun explain, “To properly value advertising investments, we need to be able to measure how each exposure to a particular media type influences a consumer’s actions. To address these limitations, technology solutions must provide a view into the history of user-media interactions and provide a means to apportion the value of desired outcomes accordingly,” they add.

In other words, if sponsored search is to be sustained as a commercially viable business model then better methods of evaluating the return on investment are now needed.