Abstract

In the sponsored search model, search engines are paid by businesses that are interested in displaying ads for their site alongside the search results. Businesses bid for keywords, and their ad is displayed when the keyword is queried to the search engine. An important problem in this process is keyword generation: given a business that is interested in launching a campaign, suggest keywords that are related to that campaign. We address this problem by making use of the query logs of the search engine. We identify queries related to a campaign by exploiting the associations between queries and URLs as they are captured by the user’s clicks. These queries form good keyword suggestions since they capture the “wisdom of the crowd ” as to what is related to a site. We formulate the problem as a semi-supervised learning problem, and propose algorithms within the Markov Random Field model. We perform experiments with real query logs, and we demonstrate that our algorithms scale to large query logs and produce meaningful results.

Citations