Yahoo Ads may start getting a little more relevant as Yahoo Publisher Network is testing a new algorithm codenamed "Project Panama" that is heavily inpsired by Google Adwords techniques.

Until now, Yahoo Ads are ranked only on the basis of the amound paid by advertisers. But the new model is actually similar to Google Adwords Ad Rank algorithm which calculates the bid price and Advertisers' Quality Score (like historical CTR, etc) to make sure the best performing ads appear on a website.



Yahoo is hoping that the Google-like algorithm should result in higher click-through rates as the model displays more relevant ads.

Yahoo! has notified certain high-volume search buyers of the upcoming changes to its sponsored search monetization algorithm and RBC analyst Jordan Rohan expects that Yahoo will rollout to the U.K. in July while a full rollout in the United States and Japan will likely happen in late 2006 or early 2007.