But, now the Tool redirects permanently to the Yahoo Small Business page to entice visitors to try search marketing with the beleaguered Web property. Yahoo finally figured out that the Overture Tool still had enough fans and traffic that it was of value to redirect this URL to a webpage to gain a little business.

Before Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, the Overture Tool was really the only game in town. Yes, it was an imperfect tool as many of the results were out of order and sometimes conflicted wildly with the results of the other tools once they came online. But, the Overture Tool at least gave the SEO some direction as to if a particular keyword phrase was popular or not. Sometimes it was accurate and sometimes not, but at least phrases could be tested, verified and validated based upon the Overture Tool searches.

My wish for the Yahoo Overture Tool would have been to put up an historical page with a little detail about how it came about, number of visitors and why it was abandoned and just keep it there for archival purposes. But, Yahoo chose to go a different direction and simply redirect just for the sake putting something there rather than “Page Not Found.” It’s not poetic but it is what it is. Now, if they can ever get their Yahoo Publisher Network out of beta, that would be poetic.

But, Microsoft has not blinked because of the announcement. In fact, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a preemptive announcement that Yahoo’s earnings would not affect the bid price for his company to take over Yahoo.

In fact, Ballmer has stated that Yahoo has until the end of this week to accept his offer or face a proxy campaign that could lower the price off the $31 per share offer that is currently on the table. Critics see this MicroHoo merger as a negative since it will shorten the field of players in the search marketplace.

Stay tuned as this has the makings of a very bumpy ride in the days to come.

While Yahoo Site Explorer in itself is a useful tool, it falls short of Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools in offering a robust system to webmasters who want a leg up on the competition. And, what is more is that Yahoo IndexTools may be integrated into the company’s advertising program as well to aid advertisers and marketers with critical information.

A week ago, Yahoo announced their new Yahoo AMP ad management platform that will help publishers, advertisers and other middlemen communication faster and more effectively through their Web interface. It is rumored that Yahoo IndexTools is expected to further integrate with this platform as well.

This will give ad buyers and sellers added insight into the market and how to target advertisements more effectively. The question remains, however, will Yahoo IndexTools be available to anyone who wants it simply by logging into a Yahoo account? Of course, there will be more details to come in the weeks ahead.

In a radio advertisement that has just begun airing, the Yahoo voiceover says “…search engines like Google get you lost in all of the links, but not Yahoo.” There is also attention given to Yahoo’s dropdown search box and upcoming features for the world’s second most used search engine.

Yahoo (sometimes called the Avis of search) as the number two contender and subject of buyout and takeover talks recently needs to draw a distinction between its offerings and that of Google. Since people are creatures of habit, this will not be an easy task to draw searchers away from the Mountain View behemoth.

But, while Yahoo may be slapping Google with one hand, they are shaking hands with the other as both search companies and top social destination Myspace have teamed up to endorse the non-profit OpenSocial Foundation. The three are facing off with Facebook over the open source standard going forward for social networking sites.

So, like a candidate in a political debate who will sometimes face-off with the frontrunner and at other times join forces to gang up on another rival, Yahoo gives Google a slap then a tickle in the competitive world of search. But, unlike most political races, there is no election day as the quest for votes among the search engines is ongoing plus there is no end is sight for this debate.

Now, in a step towards more transparency, Yahoo has hired third party vendor Click Forensics to help them deal with PPC fraud perpetuated by both people and robots. Yahoo already has over 2,700 filters in place to detect click fraud and says that it does not pass those clicks onto its advertisers.

But, in the past advertisers have been burned, sometimes on a massive scale and have sued and settled with both Yahoo and Google. So, in order to combat this “fox watching the henhouse” phenomenon that makes advertisers and publishers nervous, Yahoo has hired Click Forensics to monitor and report fraudulent activity through its PPC network.

How much access Click Forensics will be given to the Yahoo data is anyone’s guess at this point. The search engines have been reluctant to open up their code to anyone because of two fears. First, they fear their proprietary information may end up in the hands of their competitors. Second, they fear their proprietary information will end up in the hands of hackers and others who want to game their system.

But, no matter. At least Yahoo is distinguishing itself from Google by taking a step towards transparency and employing a third party to validate click fraud statistics and perhaps even recommend ways to cut down or filter out click fraud.

In the end, this will give more advertisers and publishers trust in Yahoo for taking steps that is in everyone’s best interest. Sometimes just the perception of taking positive action will go a long way towards building better business relationships.

Website owners will be able to ratings, reviews, images, deep links and other data directly to the Yahoo results pages through the company’s Machined Learned Ranking technology. For instance, a restaurant may include data such a photos, reviews and location in the search engine results pages making the SERPs much more visually appealing and offering more in-depth information.

Gone will be the days of the simple title, abstract and link, unless of course the user wants this simplicity. According to Yahoo, its Search Monkey features can be turned off or on at will, giving visitors a choice of how much information they want to see on the results pages.

One important aspect of Search Monkey that Yahoo hasn’t addressed yet is the real estate on the SERPs pages. With all the new data, will each listing be larger and if so will the top 10 rankings fall into the realm of a top 5 or top 8 perhaps? No matter, perhaps, Search Monkey is just what Yahoo needs to get out of the money doldrums and back on track to take on Google in a more meaningful way.

While the jury is still out on whether visitors will go ape over Search Monkey (or whether they will just throw pooh at it), one thing is for certain and that is that Yahoo needs to make some bold moves to get back into the search game. Perhaps Search Monkey is such a bold move.