And launches regional version of Panama

May 29, 2007 12:22 GMT  ·  By

The Sunnyvale company is now following its rival Google and tries to conquer the UK with a regional flavor of the search advertising platform Panama. Back in April, the Mountain View company developed a new flavor of its Google Maps service, especially addressed to UK users and compatible with all Java mobile phones. A few months ago, Google also debuted a UK version of Checkout that allows customers to buy stuff with ease. Yahoo is now aiming to do the same thing, just that the main product of the evolution is now Panama.

According to E-consultancy.com, the giant portal Yahoo informed several users from the country that the company will start a beta session very soon as it intends to test Panama in UK. The Sunnyvale company first announced that it will release Panama in England in the second quarter of the year but at this time, the interested users are able to use only a testing release of the ad platform. However, they should be a little bit lucky because Yahoo selects only a limited number of users and includes them into the testing session.

"To help ensure we launch our new ranking model successfully, we have started running a limited test across our UK advertisers listings in which the display order of sponsored search listings in some keyword markets is based on factors other than bid. Our new sponsored search system will be rolled out in the UK soon, beginning with advertiser migration later this quarter," it was mentioned in the email according to E-consultancy.com.

Panama is quite a young Yahoo product because it was launched soon after the giant portal encountered evolution problems into the Asian market. At that time, Yahoo was quite in a deep crisis so it urgently needed a powerful solution able to revamp the company. Panama was the hero, the service being promoted today as the main Yahoo advertising platform.