Proximic turns products listings into contextual ads

Cory Bergman January 16th, 2008

A small German company called Proximic has teamed with Yahoo and eBay to automatically display contextually-related product listings on any publisher’s site. Think of it as Adsense for products. Proximic says the click rates for these relevant products is much, much higher (1.5 percent) than Adsense campaigns (.25 percent). But what makes these even more interesting is Proximic is using vector mathematics to power it. Explains co-founder and CTO Thomas Nitsche: “We look at patterns of letters. We get a profile. The profile is a vector. We compare two vectors, and compute proximity by pattern distance. We can generate proximity between texts. The text can be one word, two words, 15 words, or a complete page.” Nitsche says other techniques, like the ones Google use for Adsense, can’t process quickly enough with millions and millions of products in its database. Keep an eye on this company, folks.