System and method for efficient ranking in online advertising by shaping relevance scores

A computer readable medium comprising program code that when executed by a programmable processor causes execution of a method for ranking advertisements in an auction-based advertising system, the computer readable media comprising:

• program code for receiving one or more search queries;
• program code for selecting one or more keywords from the one or more search queries;
• program code for retrieving one or more bids associated with a given keyword selected from the one or more search queries;
• program code for determining a priority score for one or more advertisements, wherein each of the one or more advertisements is associated with a given bid, the priority determined by taking the product of a position normalized click through rate associated with a given advertisement adjusted by an exponential value and the given bid;
• and
• program code for ranking the one or more advertisements according to the priority score.

A system for ranking advertisements in an auction-based advertising system, the system comprising:

• a network;
• one or more user devices coupled to the network;
• one or more advertiser devices coupled to the network;
• a content server coupled to said network, the content server comprising:
• a query analyzer operative to receive one or more search queries from the one or more user devices and select one or more keywords from the one or more search queries;
• an ad generator operative to generate one or more advertisements corresponding to a search query;
• a rank generator operative to retrieve one or more bids associated with a given keyword selected from the one or more search queries, determine a priority score for the one or more advertisements, wherein each of the one or more advertisements is associated with a given bid, the priority score determined by taking the product of a position normalized click through rate associated with a given advertisement adjusted by an exponential value and the given bid and rank the one or more advertisements according to the priority score.