Patent ID: 7231358

Claim:
A method for managing an advertising flight in a pay-for-placement marketplace among one or more advertisers and one or more searchers, the method comprising: maintaining a computer network-accessible database of advertiser search listings, each search listing including a bid amount, a search term and a network location identifier of an advertiser associated with the search listing, the bid amount corresponding to economic value given by the associated advertiser to an operator of the pay-for-placement marketplace when network locations of the associated advertiser are referred to a searcher in response to a database query from the searcher, search results produced from the database in response to the database query being displayable to the searcher in a rank according to the bid amounts of the search listings of the search results; receiving advertising flight parameters from an advertiser; from time to time, reviewing bid amounts for specified advertiser search listings in the pay-for-placement marketplace; and adjusting bid amounts of the specified advertiser search listings to achieve specified advertiser goals of the advertising flight parameters.