From Amr Awadallah, a Yahoo fellow, but one worth listenting to.
Some background, Panama brings two core changes:
One launched a few months ago and that is the new advertiser facing UI (user interface), it is much faster and easier to use than the original Overture UI (which was not upgraded in years) and brings many new features like ad templates, creative testing, immediate ad activation, and geo-targeting.
The other core change is what Yahoo! will launch late evening on Monday Feb 5th, and that is the spanken new Quality-Ordering marketplace. In a nut-shell, Yahoo!’s current marketplace orders the sponsored results by how much the advertisers are bidding regardless of how relevant the ad is to the query the user issues, the new marketplace will focus more on the relevance of the ad and how it relates to the query.
Quality-Ordering (aka Quality Reordering) is a win-win-win, i.e. it is a win for the users since they get more relevant sponsored results, it is a win for advertisers since they get leads that are more likely to convert (so higher ROI), and it is a win for Yahoo! since higher quality equals more clicks.