• Retuers, Thursday, May 18, 2006 10:45 AM

Not to be outdone by Google and Microsoft, Yahoo did some analyst day grandstanding of its own in San Francisco yesterday. Search execs in particular trumpeted the targeting capabilities of its new advertising system; Tim Cadogan, the company's vice president of search, boasted that Yahoo now collects "more data about the quality of advertisers' listings than any other competitor." The new system measures an ad's performance on a five-point scale and is able to determine specific criteria like queries that indicate a specific versus an implied intent to shop. I'm not sure how familiar Yahoo is with Microsoft's AdCenter, but the Redwood giant also unveiled a completely revamped ad system this month that targets by network behavior, demographics and search history. It's impossible for a neutral party at this stage to formatively declare who has the better targeting system. I'm sure they're both better than what was offered before; after all, it would seem that both MSN and Yahoo Search have nowhere to go but up in their bid to wrestle market share away from Google. Like MSN, Yahoo hopes to leverage its user data to improve overall ad effectiveness across its network.

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