Advertising auctions and modeling externalities- June 26, 2008 Googlers Gagan Aggarwal, Jon Feldman, S. Muthukrishnan, and Martin Pal have an upcoming paper, "Sponsored Search Auctions with Markovian Users", with a new model of people's behavior that captures the idea that some ads may cause people to stop looking at the other ads.An excerpt:Prior models assume that the probability of an ad getting clicked is independent of other ads that appear with it on the same page, an assumption made without much justification. It is hard to imagine that seeing an...http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/06/advertising-auctions-and-modeling.html Getting things smart- June 21, 2008 I was not going to post about this, but I cannot seem to get Steve Yegge's post, "Done, and Get Things Smart", out of my head. It is clever piece on hiring that challenges the conventional wisdom.An excerpt:Smart and Gets Things Done is a good weeder function to filter out some of the common "epic fail" types.But realize that this approach has a cost: it will also filter out some people who are just as good as you, if not better, or even way better, along dimensions that are entirely invisible..http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/06/getting-things-smart.html Hal Varian on advertising auctions- June 14, 2008 Google Chief Economist Hal Varian has a post on the Official Google Blog on "How auctions set ad prices".What is particularly interesting about the post is where the description differs from the theory. For most Web advertising auctions, advertisers are ordered by (bid CTR), where CTR is the clickthrough rate on the advertisement. The net effect is that people end up paying per impression, for the space used on each page, which is what publishers generally want.However, Hal spends quite a...http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/06/hal-varian-on-advertising-auctions.html Stages of Web 2.0 startups- June 14, 2008 Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM has an amusing post, "The 5 Stages of a Consumer Web Startup".Some excerpts:One day an entrepreneur ... gets an idea ... and starts coding. A few weeks or possibly days, a beta -- increasingly a euphemism for a not-fully-thought-out-product -- emerges.The buzz builds ... the entrepreneur rejoices. The VCs ... do a fly-by ... Eight weeks later reality sets in. The traffic stops growing or -- worse yet -- dives ... But as an ever-optimistic entrepreneur it's time to..http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/06/stages-of-web-20-startups.html Jeff Dean on Google infrastructure- June 14, 2008 Google Fellow Jeff Dean gave a talk at Google IO called "Underneath the Covers at Google: Current Systems and Future Directions". Slides (PDF) also are available.I was going to post some detailed notes on the talk, but James Hamilton's excellent post on the talk already covers most of what I was going to say.Adding to James' thoughts, let me emphasize two parts of the slides that, even if you have seen this stuff many times before, definitely are worth a peek.First, Jeff's descriptions of real.http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/06/jeff-dean-on-google-infrastructure.html |