For those who haven’t heard, one big rumour is Yahoo is about to enter, via Yahoo! Publisher Network, the contextual search engine click thru game to compete against Google Adsense:

Oh, and anyone want to bet that their new “publishing tools” refers to a free hosted blog service that ties into their contextual ads? Brace yourselves, Blogger

Competition breeds excellence and is usually very good for customers who in this case would be webmasters doing advertising. Just look at what Gmail did to the free email market.

Slashdot is running a piece What can Yahoo Do To Compete With Google and already the responses are rocking with typical Slashdot aplomb.

Personally, I think Yahoo can come out with matching programs but unless they improve upon the Google program, which ultimately means better payout rates, more flexibility in the type of content where ads can be served, additional payment options like PayPal to publishers, etc they are going to have an uphill battle of sorts.

The biggest challenge Yahoo! has had and continues to have is that it doesn’t produce the results that Google does. This blog, for example, doesn’t come up when you type in the keywords: “Things That Make You Go Hmm.” A deeper Yahoo! search test reveals links from 461 pages to this domain. Comparatively, yesterday Google sent hundreds of hits and lists this site #1 out of 3,280,000 for “Things That Make You Go Hmm.”

Why Yahoo! seems to think some AOL member page is more relevant than this blog is a good example why Google has become a large, thriving enterprise.

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