International Journal of Information Science and Management A Profitable Sponsored Search Mechanism Faria Nassiri-Mofakham Department of Information Technology Engineering, University of Isfahan, Iran fnasiri@eng.ui.ac.ir Samer Hayek Department of Information Technology Engineering, University of Isfahan, Iran samer.hayek@yamail.com Abstract Nowadays, the Internet has had a rapid expansion and presence in all areas of the individuals, institutions, companies and organizations lives. This has made large extent of data available so that the users need to access their desired information or services through using search engines. To continue and promote providing services, search engines require a source of income. Sponsored search advertising is the main source of revenue for search engines. In sponsored search, limited areas of the search results page are dedicated to display advertising so that the advertiser pays the advertisement cost only per click. To assign advertising areas, an auction is run among advertisers. Several models have been proposed to hold a sponsored search auction. In this study, a new model is proposed to increase the revenue of the search engine. Evaluated using synthetic data, the results of the ad-supported implementation of the search engine model indicate improved revenue in comparison to existing models. Keywords: search engine, sponsored search, auction mechanism, advertisement Introduction Every day, millions of web pages full of information are being explored by millions of Internet users worldwide. Due to the large volume of information and news about goods, music, or anything else which can be easily found online, living in the virtual world would be difficult or impossible without search engines. The increasing use of search engines is not limited to keyword search for finding the products and information; they are also a good place for advertising. More than 50 percent of internet users use search engines at least once a day, so that it reaches over 6 billion searches per month only in America. Above 13 percent of the traffic from search engines comes from commercial sites (Szetela & Kerschbaum, 2010). Search engines create effective opportunities for marketers to attract millions of users towards the manufacturers and service providers’ web sites. Search engines display ads in certain regions of the page which are more likely to attract users’ attention. Sponsored search auction mechanism is used for determining the price of these limited areas and allocating them to advertisers (Jansen & Mullen, 2008)