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Project Panama, Yahoo!'s improved search marketing platform, is set to hit UK shores sometime after May. It's Yahoo!'s big chance to help create a more competitive search space and, of course, to claw back market share from runaway sector leader Google.
Panama launched fully in the US last month with the implementation of the second phase of the project, based around its ranking algorithm. With the European launch imminent, the UK search space is watching Yahoo!'s progress intently. The pressure to introduce Panama has been weighing heavily on its shoulders for some time, and not just from SEMs and brands wanting a more effective and efficient platform, says Tim Cadogan, Yahoo! VP of search.
"In 2006 we took a fair amount of heat in the press and certain circles about the project, with questions about when it was going to happen, would it go smoothly and how we were going to pull it off," he says. "It's certainly one of the largest projects Yahoo! has ever undertaken. It's such a large-scale effort of engineering that it's important we get it right."
Panama is a replacement for Overture (formerly GoTo), the pioneering search platform that Yahoo! bought in 2003 in order to run its search marketing. But in a space that develops by the second, it was clear to Yahoo! that things needed to move on quickly, says Cadogan.
Over that same period, though, Google arrived from nowhere, grabbing market share around the world and overtaking Yahoo! as the number-one player in both North America and Europe. It had an auction model that advertisers and search specialists alike found easy to use and, crucially, more cost-effective. Google now accounts for over 80% of all searches in the UK; Yahoo! is second with approximately 8%, according to Neilsen//NetRatings.
Stuart Larkins, VP of search at US company Performics, a division of DoubleClick, says the advent of Google was just as much a factor in Yahoo! upgrading to Panama as having an older system. "Stiff competition with Google and the fact that Yahoo! purely needed to provide better results to advertisers were the primary drivers," he says. "The previous platform didn't allow for the scalability that quickens and improves the process of uploading the massive amounts of keywords...