Greetings all, As some of you already know, I was out in Los Angeles last week visiting with Yahoo! In particular, I was visiting their Search Marketing group, which is in fact mostly composed of people who were with a company known as Overture that Yahoo! bought within the last year or so. (http://www.content.overture.com/d/)
One of the realities for big companies like Yahoo is that they often grow via acquisitions, which can lead to some geographical separation between the various units of the company. For example, Yahoo Search is located in Sunnyvale (which is in the Bay Area) while Search Marketing is located in Los Angeles. Apparently Yahoo is very committed to the LA area - they are building a new complex in Burbank for Search Marketing and some other divisions that relate to video content. BTW, for those of you looking for jobs, you should be aware that when you apply to Yahoo in Sunnyvale, the folks in Los Angeles probably don.t know anything about it. So you should look carefully at positions you are applying for, and if you notice that there are positions in a different location with a company that you have already applied at, you should probably apply again. Now, you might be wondering what is Search Marketing. It.s pretty simply. When you do a query at search.yahoo.com (and Google does the same thing) there are times when advertisements show up in the right hand column of the page. For example, if you search for .flowers. you.ll get a whole bunch of advertisements for companies that sell of deliver flowers. Well, how does that work? In fact, these companies bid on search terms, and if they bid highest or enough, there advertisement is shown to anyone who enters that search term. If a user/searcher then goes to their advertisement, then that company needs to pay yahoo that amount that they bid. This is essentially the same model that Google uses in their AdSense program as well. More details on the particulars of what Yahoo and Google are doing... http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/ https://www.google.com/adsense/ Now, why is this interesting to me? Well, for a few reasons. First, if a user searchers for .flowers. maybe they would like to see advertisements about .roses. too. So knowing that a rose is a kind of flower is important. This starts to become more like conceptual matching rather than direct string matching, and that is certainly what an advertiser would prefer. So, one alternative might be to take your Poor Man.s LSA program, and when a user enters a term, find all the terms that are within some threshold distance from that term, and display the advertisements for those terms. Or, perhaps you have a structured source of information like WordNet, perhaps you can use something like WordNet::Similarity measures to find those concepts that are most closely related to the search term. There is another side to this issue to . for example, when an advertiser is bidding on the term .flower. perhaps Yahoo could suggest to them .if you are interested in bidding on flowers, what about bidding on roses or shrubs too.. It.s quite clear that Yahoo and Google are both very interested in doing more conceptual matching of search terms, not only from the point of view of improving ad placement, but also in terms of improving search results. I enjoyed my visit at Yahoo and found it very motivating in that I could see that many of the issues that I.m interested in (and that we talked about in the NLP class in the fall of 2004) are very relevant indeed. Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> DonorsChoose. A simple way to provide underprivileged children resources often lacking in public schools. Fund a student project in NYC/NC today! http://us.click.yahoo.com/KZzaMD/.WnJAA/HwKMAA/x3XolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nlpatumd/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
