Yahoo will today unveil a long-promised overhaul of its online advertising system, setting the stage for a showdown with Google and Microsoft in the race to dominate the fast-growing search engine advertising industry.
The company has its European operations headquarters at East Point in Dublin, which will eventually employ 400 people. Like Microsoft, which introduced its own online advertising platform last week, Yahoo also said its new technology had been designed to handle the next wave of targeted, interactive advertising.
The internet companies have said that they plan to take ideas learnt in the search engine world to a wider market of mobile phones, TV sets and video-game consoles. The technology overhaul is seen on Wall Street as Yahoo's most significant single initiative this year, as it tries to overcome a widening gulf between the effectiveness of its own advertising system and that operated by Google.
The new system marks the first revamp since the platform was launched by internet start-up GoTo in the late-1990s and is designed to act as the foundation on which much of Yahoo's advertising business will run for at least the next five years, said Tim Cadogan, vice-president of search at Yahoo.
Later renamed Overture, GoTo was the first company to introduce targeted advertising linked to search results, and was acquired by Yahoo two years ago. Google later adopted a similar model, prompting a lawsuit from Overture that was settled shortly before Google's initial public offering.
Despite its early lead, the Yahoo advertising platform has lost ground to Google, and represents one of the main reasons that Yahoo's search engine advertising revenues have grown more slowly. Yahoo generates 30-50 per cent less advertising income for each search conducted on its site than Google, according to Wall Street estimates.
As part of the overhaul, Yahoo will change the way it prioritises the adverts that are displayed in its search results, said Mr Cadogan. At present it ranks ads based on the amount that advertisers bid to have their messages displayed - an approach that can result in an ad hogging a key position even if no users click on it, reducing the amount of income generated for Yahoo.
A new ranking formula, to be adopted later this year, will also take into account the "click-through rate" of an advert, along with a number of other secret factors, said Mr Cadogan - an approach that echoes the one followed by Google. - ( Financial Times service)
