The partnership between Yahoo! And Microsoft hit another big milestone as the companies give some hint of when major changes to advertising will actually happen.

Details are few, but one thing is certain, Yahoo’s advertising center will migrate over to the Microsoft Ad Center when the process is finally complete.

Currently, according to a news release and the companies new search alliance web site, the deal is set to go through before the 2010 holiday season. The timing sure to annoy just about every advertiser currently using Yahoo, so the duo left the window open for early 2011 after the holiday search season.

Once the deal actually goes through, Microsoft says advertisers using their Ad Center will reach up to 577 million searchers; which converts to better ROI and making it easier to segment campaigns among a large group of many niches.

While Microsoft is taking control of the advertising side of the partnership, Yahoo! continues to push its content and human support system.

Yahoo! and Microsoft will each provide customer support to different advertiser segments: Yahoo!’s sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients. Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns.

Everyone remembers the great Google snafu that saw search results change dramatically right before the holiday season, so my bet is on this partnership actually taking off in early 2011 — despite the fact that Microsoft surely wants to demonstrate Bing in a complete form for the holidays.

Microsoft and Yahoo! promise to give a three-month warning before the actual change and provide more details about making the switch to Ad Center or how advertising will change for either company. Until then, the partners’ Search Alliance Web site has some good details mixed with the self promotion

[Via Search Alliance]

Ask.com unveils its new coupon aggregator, and for the most part is looks sleek, fast and very user friendly.

Ask rolled out Ask Deals; which will let searchers browse coupons and deals from dozens of coupon sites, retail sites, message boards and blogs.

Ask Networks President Scott Garell told the AP that the company decided to focus on the bargain market because so many people use coupons. According to coupon-processing company Inmar Inc., use of electronic discounts and coupons more than doubled in the first half of 2009 from the same period last year, as overall coupon use rose 23 percent. Electronic coupons now account for more than 3 percent of all coupons used, up from about 2 percent last year.

If it sounds familiar, remember Bing. But instead of focusing most of the attention on travel deals, Ask.com is thinking retail in a big way. It’s a great idea, putting all the SlickDeals, TigerDirect and HP deals in one place, but how does it stack up? Garell seems to think it’s quite good.

“When you look at the raw scale and quality of what we’re doing, it’s better,” he said.

It does have a very fast interface, while looking for “laptop” I got a lot of really good looking deals from a slew of sources. But I had to do some split testing between my favorite deal site –SlickDeals — and Ask.com.

I must say I was very impressed with Ask.com’s results, I looked for several things HDMI cables, HDMI switch, DVD player (I’m working on the home entertainment system). On most results, Ask pulled up the top deals from SlickDeals in the first few results, and brought me to some even better deals a couple times. It stacks up to be better than SlickDeals on searching, I never have to plow through a ton of forum posts just to find a deal.

I even bought some RAM I saw via the Deal$ search, one I never saw on SlickDeals. Their local only is also intriguing, but in my tests it simply linked me to the retail site where I had to put in my ZIP code.

Searching for things like headphones does show the limits to Ask.com, unless you know the brand you want, the Deal$ search will not show you the best deal, just the lowest price. While searching, for instance, there was a pretty huge deal on a pair of gaming headphones on SlickDeals’ homepage, but I went back three pages on Deal$ and didn’t see it, only cheap ear buds.

Another downside, the “hot deal” section is filled with big retailers, not the hottest individual deals like other sites — but their deal of the day e-mail could fill that gap.

This has Ask poised to drive a lot of holiday deal seeker traffic, especially since they are searching all the time, not just after Black Friday.

But the best thing about Deal$: since it aggregates instead of posts, the Ask.com search has a huge advantage over other coupon sites — all the coupons are current.

Give it a try, Ask isn’t just using hyperbole when boasting about the new search, it really does give Bing and Google a run for their money.

EQUTE — In a rare disclosure into how their search ranks pages, Google said they basically ignore meta tags — and have done so for a decade.

Google’s Mat Cutts explained the decision in a video.

Google doesn’t often reveal such insights into how their page ranking works, and this is a key factor and could mean a lot of people will stop spending so much time getting their meta tags high on the page.

Yahoo/Bing, on the other hand, do look to meta-tags and recommend using it in their search ranking guide.

Use a “keyword” meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.

So site owners still have incentive to keep their meta-tags relevant. It could, however, mean several tweaks to the header to better target Yahoo/Bing searches. Google will probably remain the dominant driver of search traffic, but a good ranking in Yahoo/Bing results certainly cannot hurt.