Contextual advertising or Context Match (CM) refers to the placement of commercial textual advertisements within the content of a generic web page.

Yahoo Labs is developing the next generation of contextual ad selection technology, using advanced statistical models and information retrieval techniques to retrieve the ads that are most relevant to the content of the page and the attributes of the user visiting the page. The ad selection platform supports the following high level capabilities:

• Uses intelligent page parsing to identify the most relevant page features
• Understands who is viewing the content
• Searches for ads with highest relevance or click probability
• Determines best candidate ads for the opportunity
• Uses response prediction and information retrieval (IR) models
• Respects advertiser and publisher constraints to restrict potential ads to serve
• Optimizes ad selection among eligible ads to maximize return
• Supports robust page crawling that provides high rate of availability of crawled pages for use in matching