Abstract: A system for online advertisement (“ad”) trading is described by which advertisers and affiliates can trade online ads and ad placements. The system receives bids for placing online advertisements from advertisers and offers to place online advertisements from affiliates and matches bids and offers. Matching bids and offers includes matching ad placement security types respectively associated with each of the bids and the offers. An ad placement security type is defined by at least one parameter representative of an advertiser quality level and at least one parameter representative of an affiliate quality level. Responsive to the matching of a bid to an offer, online advertisements from the advertiser that submitted the bid are delivered for placement via an online property or service associated with the affiliate that submitted the offer.

Abstract: A method and apparatus are included for providing sponsored search ads for an esoteric Web search query. In one example, the method includes receiving search results and a request for placement of sponsored ads onto a search results page, retrieving bidder term vectors associated with every search result URL of the search results, calculating for every bidder term a weight associated with a given search result set, sorting bidder terms by their weight that is associated with a given search result set, and returning sponsored search ads for bidder terms with higher weights.

Abstract: A hierarchical category system for organizing and displaying electronic advertisements is disclosed. Each electronic advertisement is assigned one or more categories from a hierarchical categorization system. Similarly, each available advertisement placement location is also provided with a category from the hierarchical categorization, system. Then, when displaying advertisements, the system attempts to locate advertisements that have matching categorizations. When no matching advertisement with an exact matching categorization can be found, the system will attempt to locate an advertisement from a more specific (child) category that is a sub category of the current category. However, the advertisement from the more specific (child) category must specify the broader category within its own allowable fall-back path.

Abstract: The present invention provides for enhanced search results in response to a search request based on a search term. The enhanced search results generate a search results page including a plurality of document identifiers including a hyperlink and an abstract, each abstract including a plurality of abstract terms. The method and apparatus, upon receipt of the search request, accesses a relevancy factor database that includes relevancy factors. The relevancy factors are determined by accessing feedback logs for search results based on the same search term, calculating a popularity factor for each of the plurality of phrases in the abstracts and user selection activity and relevancy factors are based on the popularity factors. Thereby, the method and apparatus generates the search results page with the sequence of the document identifiers based on the relevancy factors.