Yahoo! Panama Platform Launches Today

This afternoon at 3pm PST, the world of Yahoo! paid search advertising will forever change. Yahoo! will begin switching customers from their current "bid for position" platform to the new "Panama" platform which more closely resembles Google AdWords' popular "quality score" system. It's a big move for the company and their future heavily depends on how well (or how badly) the migration goes.

There's coverage of this all over the web today...

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim writes: As successful switch could mean the difference between Yahoo’s road to a comeback, or instead, further languishing behind Google - and facing a strong challenge from Microsoft’s adCenter.

Mona Elesseily at Search Engine Land writes: With the new ranking algorithm, Yahoo will move from its long-standing and original bid-to-position model (where those who pay the most rank first) to a system that takes bids, ad quality and other factors into consideration in determining how ads are ranked on search results pages (a system similar to that long used by Google).

David Utter at WebProNews offers up five tips to prepare for the move.

Patricia Hurst at ClickZ writes about local advertising options post Panama.

Robert Hof at Business Week talks about Panama's impact on Yahoo!'s future.

There's also a thread discussing the change at Webmaster World.