Selecting directly bid upon advertisements for display

• US 20070233653A1
• Filed: 03/31/2006
• Published: 10/04/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 03/31/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Li, Li, Ragno, Robert, Biggs, Jody
• Granted Patent: US 8,370,343 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/02 Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising

Abstract

Methods and systems in search marketing which permit advertisers to provide advertisements to a search engine, as well as bids associated with the advertisements themselves, are provided. Advertisements are selected for presentation when they are determined to be relevant and payment for presentation is due only upon the conditions of the bid being met. If desired, advertisers may be permitted to provide, in addition to an advertisement, one or more destination pages associated with selection of the advertisement. In this case, relevance can be determined not only on the basis of the content of the advertisement itself, but also on the content of the destination page(s).

Claims

1. A method for selecting advertisements for presentation in response to a search query term, the method comprising:

receiving the search query term;

receiving at least one document having an advertisement and a bid associated therewith;

determining if the at least one document is relevant to the search query term; and

if the at least one document is relevant to the search query term, presenting the advertisement associated with the at least one document in response to the search query term.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein receiving at least one document comprises receiving a plurality of documents, each document having an advertisement and a bid associated therewith.

3. The method of claim 2, further comprising identifying a subset of the plurality of documents which contain at least a portion of the search query term, wherein determining if the at least one document is relevant to the search query term comprises determining if each document of the subset of documents is relevant to the search query term.

4. The method of claim 2, further comprising determining if the received search query term includes more than one individual term.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein if it is determined that the received search query term includes more than one individual term, the method further comprises:

for each individual term, identifying a subset of the plurality of documents containing the individual term;

determining a threshold number of individual terms; and

identifying a set of pre-qualified documents by comparing the subset of the plurality of documents for each individual term with one another to identify documents containing the threshold number of individual terms.

6. The method of claim 5, further comprising identifying a set of matching documents, wherein each of the matching documents is a member of the set of pre-qualified documents and includes at least one grouping of two or more of the individual terms in the search query term.

7. The method of claim 6, wherein determining if the at least one document is relevant to the search query term comprises determining if each document of the set of matching documents is relevant to the search query term.

8. The method of claim 7, further comprising:

ranking each document of the set of matching documents that is determined to be relevant to the search query term; and

selecting at least one advertisement for presentation based upon the ranking received by the associated document.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the at least one document includes at least one destination page associated therewith.

10. The method of claim 9, wherein the at least one document includes a plurality of destination pages associated therewith, and wherein receiving the at least one document having an advertisement and a bid associated therewith comprises receiving the at least one document having an advertisement, a first bid associated with a first of the plurality of destination pages, and a second bid associated with a second of the plurality of destination pages associated therewith.

11. One or more computer-readable media having computer-useable instructions embodied thereon for performing the method of claim 1.

12. A method for accepting bids for presentation of advertisements in response to a search query term, the method comprising:

receiving a document including at least one advertisement associated therewith;

receiving at least one bid on the document; and

storing the document and the at least one bid in association with one another.

13. The method of claim 12, further comprising assigning an identifier to the document.

14. The method of claim 13, wherein storing the document and the at least one bid in association with one another includes storing the document and the at least one bid in association with the assigned identifier.

15. One or more computer-readable media having computer-useable instructions embodied thereon for performing the method of claim 12.

16. A system for selecting relevant advertisements for presentation in response to a search query term, the system comprising:

a keyword server configured to receive at least one search query term;

a document index server configured to identify documents stored in association therewith that contain at least a portion of the at least one search query term, each of the documents stored in association with the document index server having at least one advertisement and a bid associated therewith;

a listing server configured to determine an expected monetization for each document stored in association with the document index server based upon the at least one bid associated therewith and to rank the documents stored in association with the document index server based upon relevance to the at least one search query term; and

an advertisement server configured to retrieve relevant advertisements based upon the rankings.

17. The system of claim 16, wherein the document index server includes a word-based index comprising a plurality of words.

18. The system of claim 17, wherein the document index server is further configured to store, for each word in the index, a count of documents stored in association therewith that contain the word and a list of document identifiers for each document in the count.

19. The system of claim 17, wherein the document index server is further configured to store, with each document identifier in the count, a count of occurrences of the word in the document, a length of the document, and list of the occurrence positions of the word in the document.

20. The system of claim 17, wherein the document index server is further configured to store, for each word in the index that is a noise word, a flag in association therewith.