Course wrapup

At this point, all that is left for you all to turn in is your project plan/course module, which are due 3/17.

When you turn it in, you can also stop by to pick up the remaining graded assignments from my office.  Almost everything should be graded by that point.

If you have any questions about the project plan/course module or your grade, please email me.  I won't be around campus, but I'll be happy to discuss things with you anyway.

Rankmaniac reborn results

Our last experiment of the term would down yesterday and here're the final standings.  The TAs held their own, but Jonathan & Manuel ran away with it ... winning by 175 clicks!  And it seems that click fraud was indeed very hard -- teams that put a lot of effort into it didn't get many returns.

I hope it was fun for everyone...

Here are the final standings:

1) Jonathan & Manuel  (514 clicks!)
2) Daniel, Michelle, Jeremy, & Walter
3) Dallin, Rishi, & Anthony
4) Patrick & Rico
5) Marland, Christina, Jiyoung
6) TAs (91 clicks)
7) Bose, Michelle, Thomas, Sonal
8) Ram, Victor, Esther
9) Daniel, Chris, Andy
10) Fernando, Masoud, Zhenhua
------------40 clicks---------------
11) Hailey, Jim

an adwords suggestion

As some of you realized, your campaign in adwords may stop/reduce gaining clicks after some time. Remember that the difference of the bidding algorithms between google and yahoo. google uses your bid submitted times the clickthrough rate (CRT) to bid the ad slots. CRT is initialized some value and then measured during your campaign. If the CRT of some keywords in your campaign become very low, you may try some new keywords to increase your clicks.

Last lecture!

We had the last lecture of the term today.  We finished up our discussion of ad auctions by talking about VCG and the relative drawbacks/benefits of it compared with GSP designs. 

Then, we finished with a brief overview of the term...please look at the slides in loo of a final just to make sure you remind yourself of all the topics we covered this term :)

...and thanks again to everyone for all the hard work. 

Note -- I will be off campus for much of the next week and a half, so please email me if you'd like to meet to discuss the project plan or course module design.  I'll be happy to set up an appointment.  You can also discuss this with the TAs either Tues or Wed night (they will be covering my office hours for me this week).

Monday is the last lecture

...as I announced in class yesterday.  Monday will be the last lecture. 

I'll present VCG and then we'll discuss possible reasons why Google/Yahoo aren't using it.

Also, I'll do a brief review of what we did during the term.  Please try to attend.  Since I'm not having a final, I'm hoping this lecture serves the goal of causing you to think back over what we've done during the term.

Bug in HW 6

We've found this bug in homework 6 : in Fig. 2, ignore the bit that says r_1 = 1.

This means r_1 can take any arbitrary value in the examples you create.

HW 7 is out

The last HW is now available on the web page...

Be sure to start the "rankmaniac revisited" problem TODAY! Otherwise you're missing a whole $1 of your budget...

Ceremonial conclusion to Rankmaniac

The rankmaniac competition is coming to a close this Thursday...

The official results will be gathered from a search at 12:15 in 209 Annenberg.  All comers are welcome.  I will have a prize for the winning team, so please come if you're near the top :) 

I'll order some pizza too since it's lunch time.  (I'll ask in class tomorrow whether you're planning to come or not so that I can get some kind of estimate on how much to order.)

Lecture 15: Auction basics

Today we went through a brief overview of sponsored search and then transitioned into the basics of auction theory.  We didn't quite make it through the "basics of auction theory" lecture notes, but I'll post them soon anyway.  Next class we'll finish up those notes and then move on to studying how ad auctions actually work.

Note -- We took a vote in class and decided to change the project plan assignment deadline until the end of finals.  So, the project plans are now due on 3/17.