Today I received another YSM newsletter that announces a new break through ranking algorithm:

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.

Ad quality is determined by:

1. The ad’s historical performance - its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.
2. 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.

Well, that is new

At least they’re trying to learn from Google. YSM really is the worst and I don’t like at all spending time with it as I think it’s really user unfriendly. Also there are a lot of other things that I don’t like about it which I might talk about another time.