Yahoo’s new contextual search engine, called Project Panama is due to go live this summer according to the NYTimes.

"Yahoo has taken a lot of bumps and bruises," said Peter Hershberg, a managing partner of Reprise Media, a New York search-advertising agency. "We would get notification every day that data was not available, and that made it very challenging to manage our campaigns." He added that these problems had been cleared up in recent weeks."

I met Peter Hershberg early this year and also bumped into him and some of his fellow Reprise Media coworkers at an MSN after hours party at SESNY06.

"While the underlying Panama system has a lot of capabilities, the first version will present only a subtle difference from what Google offers. Advertisers will simply enter the keywords they want their ad to appear next to and the maximum price they are willing to pay for a click. The most significant option will be to specify a certain geographic region in which the ads will be shown, a feature Google also offers."

Hmm….doesn’t sound like Yahoo’s new contextual search engine will be much different than Google’s initially.  Maybe the differences between Google’s contextual search and Yahoo’s  will become clearer later on.