Patent ID: 8015181

Claim:
A method executed in a system for controlling a number of sponsored links that are presented by a search engine to a user's apparatus via a network in response to a request from said user's apparatus to provide links responsive to a search string submitted by the user, where a link is information that specifies location address of a webpage, comprising the steps of: obtaining a set of links that is responsive to said search string, said set including a plurality of sponsored links and a plurality of non-sponsored links; constructing a webpage that includes a subset of links from said set, and said subset includes N sponsored links, where N is a number that is determined based on history of past link selections by users that provided said search string; sending the constructed webpage to said user; where, in contrast to a non-sponsored link, a sponsored link is a link that triggers a payment by one party to another party in consequence of a user of said users selecting said link; augmenting said history based on a selection by said user in response to the sent webpage; and executing a process for modifying value of said N that takes into account said selection by said user, which determines whether to alter N based on a lookup table keyed to an approximate or actual ratio of selection in said history of sponsored links for said search string to total number of selections for said search string.