Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

I remember not too long ago when Yahoo (or was it just Overture back then?) sued Google for infringing on their patent regarding ppc search. I don't remember what happened with that whole deal, but obviously it didn't hurt Google at all. I think it must have been dismissed or settled or something...anyway, fast forward a few years and Yahoo is quickly becoming a near duplicate of Google's Adwords system. Every change they make brings them closer in line with Google. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, either. I always thought Google's system was easier to use, more intuitive and just better. Here's the latest from an email I got this morning about a change in Yahoo's ranking methodology:

On February 5, 2007, we are introducing a new ranking model in the U.S. that considers an ad's quality and bid amount. The new model is designed to help you spend less time in bidding wars and more time creating the most relevant, effective ads, which can help drive better results for your business.

Here's a quick summary of this important change:

Both bid amount and ad quality will determine an ad's rank in search results beginning February 5, 2007.

This will replace the current method, in which ads are ranked by bid amount only (bid-to-position).

This is designed to allow you to focus less on competitive bidding practices and more on the quality of your ads.

By improving the quality of your ads and making them more relevant to users, you may be rewarded with a better ranking and/or a lower cost for your ads.

What is "Ad Quality"?
Ad quality is determined by:

• The ad's historical performance - its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.
  
• The ad's expected performance - determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!'s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time.
  
• Overall ad quality is displayed in a graphical form by the quality index.
  

If I was in charge of sending out this email, here's what it would have said:

Yo! Yahoo Search Marketing here. We know you've always liked Google's advertising system a lot better than you like ours (even though we did invent ppc advertising), so we decided to switch it up and make our ad management system just like theirs. If you still don't like it, too bad, but at least you can't complain about it anymore because we're just like Google. So there. Oh, and if you have any questions, consult Google's help center since it covers our system now since we just copied theirs. Thank you for your money business.