Optimizing Advertisements using Evolutionary Techniques
I have always been interest in different areas of Information Retrieval (lately mostly related to automatic classification, and fact extraction), and so this entry which talks about what a start-up called SnapAds does is quite interesting. Although the basic idea is quite straight-forward (try out variations of the ad, see which ones perform the best, evolve those; also avoids repetition which may reduce click-through), the devil is in details: and pay-off for good implementation could be huge. One needs to sift through lots of data to really learn; but with the scale of the web, smaller and smaller companies could try to do something similar. Very interesting!
