Google Inc.

Zhe Qian

Sridhar Ramaswamy

Mark Rose

Leslie Yeh

Jun Wu

Jie Zhou

Dekang Lin

Eric Hugh Veach

Magnus Sandberg

Monika Hildegard Henzinger

Robert J Stets, Jr

Arash Baratloo

Keith H Randall

Zhengzhu Feng

Quji Guo

Wilburt Labio

Leslie Yeh Johnson

Ming-Yee Iu

The usefulness, and consequently the performance, of advertisements are improved by allowing businesses to better target their ads to a responsive audience. Location information is determined (or simply accepted) and used. For example, location information may be used in a relevancy determination of an ad. As another example, location information may be used in an attribute (e.g., position) arbitration. Such location information may be associated with price information, such as a maximum price bid. Such location information may be associated with ad performance information. Ad performance information may be tracked on the basis of location information. The content of an ad creative, and/or of a landing page may be selected and/or modified using location information. Tools, such as user interfaces, may be provided to allow a business to enter and/or modify location information. The location information used to target and/or score ads may be, include, or define an area.

Location-specific advertising

Systems and methods to generate modified/refined user inputs based on the original user input, such as a search query, are disclosed. The method may be implemented for Roman-based and/or non-Roman based language such as Chinese. The method may generally include receiving an original user input and identifying core terms therein, determining potential alternative inputs by replacing core term(s) in the original input with another term according to a similarity matrix and/or substituting a word sequence in the original input with another word sequence according to an expansion/contraction table where one word sequence is a substring of the other, computing likelihood of each potential alternative input, and selecting most likely alternative inputs according to a predetermined criteria, e.g., likelihood of the alternative input being at least that of the original input. A cache containing pre-computed original user inputs and corresponding alternative inputs may be provided.

Suggesting and refining user input based on original user input

The usefulness, and consequently the performance, of advertisements are improved by allowing businesses to better target their ads to a responsive audience. For example, location information may be used in ad relevancy determination, and in attribute (e.g., position) arbitration. Such location information may be associated with price information, such as a maximum price bid, and/or with ad performance information. Ad performance information may be tracked on the basis of location information. The content of an ad creative, and/or of a landing page may be selected and/or modified using location information. Tools may be provided to enter and/or modify location information, such as location-dependent targeting information and price information. The location information used to target and/or score ads may be, include, or define an area. The area may be defined by at least one geographic reference point (e.g., defined by latitude and longitude coordinates) and perhaps additional information.

Tracking location-specific ad performance

Using location-specific ad creatives and/or ad landing pages in an ad system

An advertiser may be provided with fast and accurate estimates of the future cost and/or performance information for one or more actual or hypothetical ads (generally referred to as 'proto-ads'). Past auction information may be used to simulate auctions that the proto-ad would have competed in. The proto-ad may then participate in a 'replay' of such past auctions.

Estimating cost and/or performance information for an advertisement in an advertising system

An advertiser may be provided with fast and accurate estimates of the future performance of at least one of their advertisements. These estimates may be broken down by keyword, thereby providing, up-front, useful information to the advertiser about how different keywords will affect the performance and cost of their ad campaign. Estimates and/or suggestions for a set of keywords, given additional campaign parameters, may be generated by using historical search traffic (or some other ad serving trigger) data to predict future inventory and to find useful keyword (or some other serving constraint) variations. Current data on competing ads may be used to simulate the competitions (e.g., real-time auctions) that the given ads will participate in.

Estimating inventory, user behavior, and/or cost and presentation attributes for an advertisement for use with an advertising system

Using location information from a request to control ad serving

One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that automatically classifies documents (such as web pages) based on user inputs. During operation, the system obtains a 'classified' set of documents which are classified as relating to a specific topic. The system also obtains queries related to the specific topic. These queries produce 'query results' which enable the user to access documents related to the query. The queries also include &#x201c;click information&#x201d; which specifies how one or more users have accessed the query results. The system uses this click information to identify documents in the classified set of documents which are not related to the specific topic or are off-topic. If such documents are identified, the system shifts the identified documents so that they are regarded as off-topic and/or spam, and removes the identified documents from the classified set of documents.

Method and apparatus for classifying documents based on user inputs

The usefulness, and consequently the performance, of advertisements are improved by allowing businesses to better target their ads to a responsive audience. Location information, such as country, region, metro area, city or town, postal zip code, telephone area code, etc. is determined (or simply accepted) and used. For example, location information may be used in a relevancy determination of an ad. As another example, location information may be used in an attribute (e.g., position) arbitration. Such location information may be associated with price information, such as a maximum price bid. Such location information may be associated with ad performance information. Ad performance information may be tracked on the basis of location information. The content of an ad creative, and/or of a landing page may be selected and/or modified using location information. Finally, tools, such as user interfaces, may be provided to allow a business to enter and/or modify location information, such as location information used for targeting and location-dependent price information.

Determining and/or using location information in an ad system

The usefulness, and consequently the performance, of advertisements are improved by allowing businesses to better target their ads to a responsive audience. Location information is determined (or simply accepted) and used. For example, location information may be used in a relevancy determination of an ad. As another example, location information may be used in an attribute (e.g., position) arbitration. Such location information may be associated with price information, such as a maximum price bid. Such location information may be associated with ad performance information. Ad performance information may be tracked on the basis of location information. The content of an ad creative, and/or of a landing page may be selected and/or modified using location information. Finally, tools, such as user interfaces, may be provided to allow a business to enter and/or modify location information, such as location information used for targeting and location-dependent price information. The location information used to target and/or score ads may be, include, or define an area. The area may be defined by at least one geographic reference point (e.g., defined by latitude and longitude coordinates) and perhaps additional information. Thus, the area may be a circle defined by a geographic reference point and a radius, an ellipse defined by two geographic reference points and a distance sum, or a polygon defined by three or more geographic reference points, for example.

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Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Zhe Qian