Continuing the endless quest for an alternative to Google, Fast Search & Transfer and Yahoo rolled out new search advertising platforms last week, each hoping they had the answer.

Yahoo introduced the final piece of its Panama project, a new search marketing ranking model that takes ad performance into account when calculating where an ad will be placed on a page. Previously, Yahoo awarded the best page position to the advertiser willing to pay the most for a given search keyword. But as Google made clear with its recent report of 67% year-over-year quarterly revenue growth, ads that not only pay well but play well--ads that get lots of clicks--return better results for everyone involved in making them happen.

Encouraging advertisers to focus on the quality of their ads delivers a better search experience for customers, explains Tim Cadogan, Yahoo's VP of search marketing.

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For its part, Fast says publishers would do better with a search experience that doesn't involve handing half their revenue to Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo. As part of its drive to get companies using its enterprise search platform, Fast announced Fast AdMomentum, a white-label contextual advertising system that lets publishers manage and monetize search advertising on their sites without a search engine partner.

The goal of Fast AdMomentum, says Perry Solomon, VP and general manager of media solutions for Fast, is to let publishers "take control of contextual ads rather than outsourcing them to third-party providers."