Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Panama Could Provide Google Antidote

Yahoo is set to introduce its new search advertising ranking algorithm, code-named Panama, in a few weeks, and the industry sure is taking notice. Including quality (gasp) along with the keyword bid cost should generate more revenue for Yahoo and make advertisers with relevant products and messaging happier since they can get a better placement and return.

Investors like the idea too, sending Yahoo's stock higher.

However, Yahoo should add some new twist on its search engine at the same time that Panama rolls out to maximize the buzz and garner more interest from users. Just as Panama can differentiate Yahoo from Google in advertising, Yahoo needs to do some serious product differentiation if it wants to take away some of Google's market share.

Perhaps customization could do the trick. Let users tweak their results to automatically blend Answers, News, Multimedia results, or track their searches so that more relevant searches are returned (they don't have an equivalent to Google History).

Posted By John Gartner at 06:17 PM
Permanent Link: Panama Could Provide Google Antidote | Comments (0)

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