Sponsored search represents a major source of revenue for web search engines. The advertising model brings a unique possibility for advertisers to target direct user intent communicated through a search query, usually done by displaying their ads alongside organic search results for queries deemed relevant to their products or services. However, due to a large number of unique queries, it is particularly challenging for advertisers to identify all relevant queries. For this reason search engines often provide a service of advanced matching, which automatically finds additional relevant queries for advertisers to bid on. We present a novel advance match approach based on the idea of semantic embeddings of queries and ads. The embeddings were learned using a large data set of user search sessions, consisting of search queries, clicked ads and search links, while utilizing contextual information such as dwell time and skipped ads. To address the large-scale nature of our problem, both in terms of data and vocabulary size, we propose a novel distributed algorithm for training of the embeddings. Finally, we present an approach for overcoming a cold-start problem associated with new ads and queries. We report results of editorial evaluation and online tests on actual search traffic. The results show that our approach significantly outperforms baselines in terms of relevance, coverage and incremental revenue. Lastly, as part of this study, we open sourced query embeddings that can be used to advance the field.
Finally, to rank the ads by relevance (e.g., in the case too many ads are retrieved via query rewriting), it is common to apply the learning-to-rank approach @cite_8 that learns weights for query and ad features based on editorially-labeled training set. These methods typically require enormous amounts of accurate editorial grades for (query, ad) matches that are often very expensive to obtain.
@cite_8
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Many real applications in real-time news stream advertising call for efficient processing of long queries against short text. In such applications, dynamic news feeds are regarded as queries to match against an advertisement (ad) database for retrieving the k most relevant ads. The existing approaches to keyword retrieval cannot work well in this search scenario when queries are triggered at a very high frequency. To address the problem, we introduce new techniques to significantly improve search performance. First, we devise a two-level partitioning for tight upper bound estimation and a lazy evaluation scheme to delay full evaluation of unpromising candidates, which can bring three to four times performance boosting in a database with 7 million ads. Second, we propose a novel rank-aware block-oriented inverted index to further improve performance. In this index scheme, each entry in an inverted list is assigned a rank according to its importance in the ad. Then, we introduce a block-at-a-time search strategy based on the index scheme to support a much tighter upper bound estimation and a very early termination. We have conducted experiments with real datasets, and the results show that the rank-aware method can further improve performance by an order of magnitude.