Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) is trying feverishly to inject more life into its online advertising business these days with the recent rollout of Project Panama, slated to give the company a more firm footing against Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). Google's efforts in the internet advertising arena have been quite huge in recent years, and the company leads all others by a large margin in the revenue it receives from advertising on the internet. Yahoo!'s previous purchase of Overture's bidding system, as it turns out, could not hold a candle to Google's customer-relevancy keyword advertising system.

And so, Yahoo! invented a system comparable to Google's that would allow advertisers to become more relevant to Yahoo! customers. Although Yahoo! is already far behind, the company still enjoys one of the largest overall internet audiences in the world. The problem? It's not monetizing that audience like it could. To help speed up the adoption and usage of Project Panama, Yahoo! has opened it up to businesses and other developers so that it can be twisted, formed, used and re-used as much as possible and as widely as possible.

Yahoo! has no easy task in trying to catch the wave of revenue that Google currently enjoys from its advertising system, but opening up it's new competitor to businesses and developers is a great start. Gone are the days of "walled gardens" and in are the days of "open platforms" so that your own customers can dive in and get things in front of end customers in the most customized and rapid fashion. Right now, it's still too early to see what kind of impact Google will see from this. What's your guess?

With Google in clear command after Q1 earnings came in, Yahoo and MSN are launching initiatives to try and boost their search-advertising capabilities to compete with Google's wildly successful AdWords platform.

Yahoo's revamp centers on a technology revamp code-named "Panama" which focuses on bridging the gap between Yahoo! and Google with regards to the search-ad business. The new technology foundation is slated for roll out in May.

Microsoft's MSN service will launch its first search-ad network, called AdCenter, in early May as well.

According to eMarketer Inc. the revenues generated by search-advertising text ads were more than $10 billion in 2005 and they forecast that number to surpass $14 billion for 2006.

MSN's adCenter seems to gear the search-ad focus on allowing advertisers to target a specific audience/demographic type.

Yahoo! is still hush-hush about its plans but the guess is that they are trying to go head-to-head with Google in identifying user intent/patterns/psyche and having relevant ads displayed by analyzing the interplay of search queries, page content, browsing trends and patterns.