Panama Enhances Relevancy for Searchers
Over here at the Yahoo! Search blog, we haven’t said much about the new advertising platform, code-named Panama, that’s been under development for some time. That’s not to say that we haven’t been looking forward to its official arrival ‘ actually, it’s quite the opposite. We’ve followed the sentiment of Terry Semel and the YSM gang and waited for the perfect time to join in.
Today Yahoo! announced the launch of its new ranking model, which will improve the way in which ads are ranked on Yahoo! Search. Unlike the old system for ad ranking, which was essentially a ‘pay for placement’ model, the new model takes into account both advertiser bids and ad quality, including user click feedback, resulting in ads that are more relevant to a user’s query. What does this mean to you? When you search on Yahoo! you will see an improved search results page with more relevant ads that makes it easier for you to find exactly what you want.
The new ranking model is a big step for Yahoo! that improves the search experience for both advertisers and consumers. Advertisers will be rewarded for creating more relevant ads and thus get better customer referrals. And the consumer will get a faster, more rewarding search experience.
This is just the most recent of many improvements to Yahoo! Search you can expect to see over the coming months.
Take it for a test drive, try it out and let me know what you think.
Tim Mayer
Director of Product Management
Yahoo! Search
With the launch of Panama, we saw a larger number of bot hits. The URL ? strings are unique to the keyword and we get checked for each one even though the base URL is the same. What kind of frequency should we expect to see with the new ranking? We run long tail campaigns, so we see a lot of bot activity when we launch and go through the editorial process.
Help!!
Yahoo people search is no longer working.
Can somebody tell Yahoo or is it ME. (I tried on four different computers and two networks on both IE 6 and IE 7, so it is not a machine error.)
This nwe ranking feature should make ahuge difference!
Yahoo advertiser has the largest network, it’s very usefull advertising for merchants.
With so many people now paying for ads, it seems that now the major search engines like Yahoo are having to find a way of prioritising which paid customers will show or come first. Whereas previously this was done on a bidding process, it’s good that Yahoo is taking into account the relevance of the paid ad and it’s popularity with web-users. Perhaps something they could consider in their algorithm is the time spend by users on each ad. In stands to reason that if 99% of users are clicking-off within 30 seconds then the ad is either not relevant or correctly positioned.
This helps out with ads that dont have any relevancy with the search that you are doing. I think this is a great way to prioritize the ads and make it more fair for everyone.