• Amr Awadallah Blog, Monday, February 5, 2007 11:01 AM

With a great deal of fanfare, which was met positively by investors, Yahoo's new search system, Panama, has gone live. The overarching question: will it deliver for advertisers? Search blogger Amr Awadallah says yes, while providing insight as to how the new system will affect pricing and relevance. However, a big disclaimer is in order: He works for Yahoo, so his comments should be taken with a big grain of salt.

The new advertiser user interface adds new things, like ad templates, creative testing, geo-targeting and immediate ad implementation. The big change is the Quality Ordering Marketplace, which takes ad relevance into consideration (the old Overture system did not). The company believes this will make Panama as effective for advertisers as Google AdWords.

In fact, it should be a win for Yahoo and consumers, too, as better relevance should result in more clicks. The old system likely turned away potential Yahoo users. Most users are actually oblivious to the difference between a sponsored search result and an algorithmic search result, so they see a bad sponsored result at the top of Yahoo!'s SERP and just think, Yahoo's search engine isn't good. Panama, the company hopes, remedies that. Better results may mean advertisers will allocate more of their budgets to Yahoo.

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