Will Panama Allow Yahoo To Close The Gap On Google?

Yahoo, have started to roll out it’s search engine upgrade Panama across the US.  A statement on TechCrunch has just just made me realise that I’d totally misunderstood what Panama was.  I thought that Panama was Yahoo’s next generation of search engine, designed to close the gap on Google.  However, according to TechCrunch Panama will:

Panama will bring much needed updates to help Yahoo compete more effectively with Google’s contextual advertising platform. Under Panama, ads will be served and ranked based on a variety of factors, such as click through rates, instead of just placing the highest bidded ads first. The result should be significantly higher revenue to Yahoo and its partners.

I fully understand that Yahoo want to more effectively monetise its search engine, but surely they need to be tackling the problem that Google is totally dominating search usage?

In the US Google have about 55% of the total search market, and in the UK it’s a whopping 75%.  Many bloggers, including myself, have seen this first-hand in the the huge volume of traffic that comes from Google and the small amount that comes from Yahoo.
If Yahoo can claw back some market share, then this will probably have a bigger impact on its bottom line as it will not only increase the number of searches conducted, but also the number of advertisers it can service.  If I was calling the shots at Yahoo, then this is probably what I would focus on
More: TechCrunch

At the

Related Posts

• How To Get Traffic From Yahoo And Other Search Engines?
• Tivo partnership with Google or Yahoo! to be announced?
• New My Yahoo! Beta Site – First Looks
• Why Is Yahoo! Publisher Network Still In Beta?
• Connect Google Talk to AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo!
• On Microsoft, Google and Fear
• Yahoo! Launch Instant Search

Subscribe To RSS Feed Updates (What is RSS??)