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Yahoo! is opening it advertising search marketing system, Panama, to new customers in the hopes of getting business from its major rival in the industry, Google. Like Google’s CheckOut service going after EBay PayPal, the Yahoo! launch is probably too late. Microsoft is also working on a search marketing system and the field is getting crowded.
If Google is smart, and it is, the company will have an upgrade of its service available and will offer it to customers within a few days of the full launch of Panama to take the wind out of Yahoo!’s sails.
Yahoo! is inviting hundreds of thousands of its customers to use the new service, but investors have to question why advertisers would go through the work and risk of moving from Google’s highly successful platform to Panama.
The answer is that they won’t.
Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.