

Google's Chief Economist Hal Varian: Computer Mediated Transactions [pdf] - yarapavan
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/2010/cmt.pdf

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patio11
From my self-interested perspective the coolest part about the modern economy
is that small businesses can participate in it as much as the big guys.
Totally automated fulfillment? Check. Scalable online advertising? Check. User
behavior tracking? Check. A/B testing? Check. Micro-multinational 14 time
zones away from freelancers and customers? Check and check.

Heck, you can do all of the above in your _spare time_.

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btilly
For me the most interesting data point was this paragraph on page 10:

 _In 2008, Google ran 6,000 experiments involving web search which resulted in
450–500 changes in the system. Some of these were experiments with the user
interface, some were basic changes to the algorithm (Hoff (2009)). The ads
team at Google ran a similar number of experiments, tweaking everything from
the background color of the ads, to the spacing between the ads and search
results, to the underlying ranking algorithm._

That's over a dozen A/B tests per day. For each product line.

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ypk
Greg Linden's take on the same:
[http://glinden.blogspot.com/2010/02/personalization-and-
diff...](http://glinden.blogspot.com/2010/02/personalization-and-
differential.html)

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thejo
Prof. Varian lectured on this topic at the School of Information at UC
Berkeley in October, 2009. The audio is here -

[http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/dls2009...](http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/dls20091028)

