

Brilliant adwords hack: Demand Media - derrickchen
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/all/1
1. figure out popular terms
2. rank by how much adwords pays
3. create content cheaply to match that demand
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lawrence
To me, this is the killer paragraph:

"Reese is a tall Texan who serves as Demand’s chief innovation officer and who
created the idea-spawning algorithm that lies at the heart of Demand’s
process. To determine what articles to assign, his formula analyzes three
chunks of information. First, to find out what terms users are searching for,
it parses bulk data purchased from search engines, ISPs, and Internet
marketing firms (as well as Demand’s own traffic logs). Then the algorithm
crunches keyword rates to calculate how much advertisers will pay to appear on
pages that include those terms. (A portion of Demand’s revenue comes from
Google, which allows businesses to bid on phrases that they would like to
advertise against.) Third, the formula checks to see how many Web pages
already include those terms. It doesn’t make sense to commission an article
that will be buried on the fifth page of Google results. Finally, the
algorithm, like a drunken prophet, starts spitting out phrase after phrase:
“butterfly cake,” “shin splints,” “Harley-Davidson belt buckles.”

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grokcode
The scale of this thing is unbelievable. Its producting 4,000 videos and
articles per day and "By next summer, according to founder and CEO Richard
Rosenblatt, Demand will be publishing 1 million items a month, the equivalent
of four English-language Wikipedias a year."

Sadly the quality is horrible.

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dminor
Our search results are chosen by an algorithm, and now I guess created by one
as well.

