Google is certainly no stranger to the research scene, having funded numerous projects directly and having given grants to dozens more. But Google, sainted though their brand image may often be, isn’t making these moves foolishly: they have a motive to help the research projects they select. One of their recently-funded efforts is aimed at making Google advertising, and possibly even the search algorithm itself, much better at making predictions.
The project is being researched at the Blavatnik School of Computer Science of Tel Aviv University, and it’s aimed at understanding “regret” to better understand what’s likely to succeed. “Regret,” explains Tel Aviv University’s ProfessorMansour, is a term that covers all actions that lead to user failure – such as clicking on the wrong link in Google’s search results.
Professor Mansour elaborates that, by examining and understanding the numerous variables contained in hindsight records, servers and routing systems “could more efficiently prioritize server resource requests, load documents, and route visitors to an internet site.” For Google, this more specifically means creating a better advertising environment that leads to more user actions. Since a “user action” is precisely what most advertisers want, improvements here would increase loyalty to Google ads from both searchers and advertisers.
[via Search Engine Watch]
