Yahoo, the leading provider of online display advertising, has been under pressure for nearly a year as it held fruitless merger or partnership talks with Microsoft Corp, Google Inc and Time Warner Inc’s AOL.

The new services include targeting graphical adverts to users who have searched for particular terms in Yahoo’s search engine and customizing the offers in adverts based on what websites a consumer has visited and what they have done on those sites, the paper said.

Another service that is expected to go live next month will allow marketers to buy text adverts next to search results that are targeted to users during a certain time of day or based on factors such as their age and gender, according to the paper.

“Targeting a site with a couple hundred thousand users…I don’t call that targeting. I call that wasted effort,” the paper quoted Joanne Bradford, Yahoo’s senior vice president of U.S. revenue and market development, as saying. “Size does matter.”

Bradford and Michael Walrath, a senior vice president at Yahoo, will discuss the new features during a keynote address at a conference in Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday, the paper said.

They will also use the speech to urge marketers to stop thinking about search and display advertising as separate products and to take advantage of tools such as Yahoo’s search-targeting product to bridge the two, the pair told the paper in a joint interview.

Trackle today launched its new service for tracking everything you care about on the Web, all in one place. Offering the industry’s most comprehensive index of popularly tracked categories, Trackle keeps tabs on everything in your life, from local, to social to shopping. The service is built with advanced algorithms that provide a layer of intelligence to tracked results, so that people can immediately answer important questions about their information, such as “what’s new?” With Trackle, people can share like-interests with groups of friends via Twitter, SMS and email. The public beta is available now at http://www.trackle.com .

“The Web is still a walled-garden for personal information. Whether you’re going to YouTube for videos, iTunes for new albums, Facebook for new postings, ESPN for score updates or NBC/FOX for late night show guest lists — you’re visiting the same sites, often multiple times a day, just to find out what’s new,” said Pavan Nigam, founder and CEO of Trackle. “Trackle provides a simple way to track it all in a highly relevant and fun way.”

    Trackle goes beyond basic alert models or RSS feeds, to provide a more
intuitive selection of categories that help people track exactly what they're
interested in, as well as new things that they'd like to explore in the
future, or share with friends. For example, you can use Trackle to stay on top
of:
    *  Local information -- specific to your neighborhood or city
       *  Any new crime reported in your neighborhood recently
       *  Your home price fluctuations this month
       *  Low airfares from your city
    *  Social stuff -- relating to your friends and groups
       *  New job leads through your network on LinkedIn; matching your
          criteria such as "VP Marketing within 10 miles of my home"
       *  Birthdays and special occasions
       *  "You" or your family -- on the web and blogs
    *  Shopping -- and whatever is interesting to you
       *  New classifieds listings on Craigslist
       *  Sports scores and standings (during the game and after)
       *  Price drops on a Plasma TV
       *  New PG-13 Thrillers

How it Works: You can set up customized “Tracklets” for the categories you’re interested in. Every Tracklet can be personalized by entering appropriate information, (zip code for weather alert, actor name for upcoming movie releases, and product details for tracking price drops). These personalized searches run continuously in the background and generate alerts whenever a new match is found, and can be set up to provide automatic notifications over the Web, email or SMS when Trackle finds a match. Trackle also offers a convenient “preview” feature which can be used to refine your custom parameters before setting up a Tracklet for a new category.

You can easily lookup the Tracklets being used by any of your friends as long as they have marked them as ‘public’. In this way, Trackle promotes serendipitous discovery of new and interesting things for people or groups with similar interests.