Abstract: For a multi-party online advertising exchange including advertising and publishing entities and one or more third party participants, the disclosed systems and methods enable third party participation in arbitrage opportunities in online advertising transactions. A plurality of underlying transaction details are abstracted and provided to the third party participants without loss of generalization and while preserving relationships in the transaction data, to enable a third party share risk in advertising transactions. Various system refinements are provided and disclosed according to a host of optional embodiments.

Abstract: For a multi-party advertising exchange including advertising and publishing entities, each publishing entity can expose user attribute space(s) for its publishing inventory to the exchange, which are normalized to a common vocabulary within the exchange. Similarly, each advertising entity can specify one or more preferences for user attributes as requirements or definitions for advertising transactions in the exchange which are also normalized to the common vocabulary. The common vocabulary enables the comparison of a first set of user attributes to a second set of user attributes within the exchange. Supplemental user attribute data may also be received from audience data brokers, and the performance of advertising as a function of sets and subsets of user attributes over time may be recorded so that optimal display strategies can be determined.

Abstract: For a multi-party advertising exchange including advertising and publishing entities, automatic value sharing is provided for distributed users of the advertising exchange that provide valuable information to the exchange. Users provide information that has quantifiable value to the advertising exchange and/or its participants. In exchange for the information, predicated on any function or cost model for quantifying the value of the information, a reward or advantage, such as revenue, is given to the user by the advertising exchange and/or participants of the advertising exchange in order to incentivize users' valuable contributions. As a result, the advertising exchange becomes a more efficient marketplace, increasing predictability and the participant(s) benefit in correspondence with the value of any information received by those participant(s). Various refinements are provided and disclosed according to a host of optional embodiments.

Abstract: Rating information retrieval algorithms. A query is received and submitted to a search engine for execution on an index file. A list of index documents and a plurality of attributes are received from the search engine in response to the submitted query. A portion of the received list of index documents and the received plurality of attributes are stored in a subindex file. The received query is executed on the subindex file to obtain a list of subindex documents. The obtained list of subindex documents is ranked by a particular ranking algorithm using the attributes associated therewith. The list of ranked subindex documents is compared with a list of subjectively ranked documents to generate a score for the particular ranking algorithm. The generated score represents a degree of correlation between the list of ranked subindex documents and the list of subjectively ranked documents.

Abstract: The subject invention provides for systems and methods that allow a web user to more easily and readily print what they actually want to print and at the same time, mitigates user frustration that often ensues from poor web page printing. More specifically, the subject invention involves deciphering a structure or layout of any web page on the Internet. When a user employs the present print feature, the invention can be invoked to analyze the structure of a current web page to automatically generate a print preview page of the current web page. After analyzing the current web page, extraneous content of the page that is deemed to be non-critical or non-essential to that web page can be removed for printing purposes. Furthermore, previous knowledge learned regarding web page structure can be applied to determine the page and/or content structure of the current page to facilitate generating the print preview page.

Abstract: Improving ranking algorithms for information retrieval. The ranking algorithms operate on search results obtained from a search engine. Input information including information describing a first ranking algorithm, a first score associated with the first ranking algorithm, a second ranking algorithm, a second score associated with the second ranking algorithm, and causal information relating a difference between the first ranking algorithm and the second ranking algorithm with a difference between the first score and the second score is received. An optimizing algorithm is applied to the received input information to identify an optimal ranking algorithm having an optimal score. The optimal ranking algorithm is defined by a plurality of parameters and a plurality of weights associated with the plurality of parameters.