It has already been confirmed by Nick Fox, Senior Product Manager for Ads Quality at Google that Google is running a test for displaying an Ad Quality Index to the advertiser and looks like will implement it to the Adwords accounts soon:

Google is running a test now — we haven’t formally announced it yet, but I guess I’m going to tell you now — showing in the front end, quality score information to the advertiser. This is sensitive. Potentially it helps the bad guys optimize, so we have to be careful how we implement this.

For the advertiser Quality Score can serve an index of how effective are the changes made by him to the Adwords campaign or to the site’s landing pages. Keeping an eye on Quality score changes I assume would be possible to minimize campaign spends and make it more effective.

The new version of Ask.com local search AskCity was launched today! As a replacement of the previous local search engine – CitySearch, AskCity appears a considerable improvement to the system and contribution to the overall market share of Ask.com.

Starting from today on opening the Ask main page one can find an AskCity link on the right navigation bar which leads to the powerful local search engine with a bunch of handy functions to make the search as effective as possible.

Enjoy AskCity’s user-friendly interface, superb usability and a set of great AJAX features.

In case you’d like to dig into more details try AskCity PDF User Guide sent by Ask at SERoundTable.

Sign up today you will receive a FREE Google AdWords account and step by step instructions to get started. We highly recommend AdWords to all of our clients…

The upgrade of some features of Yahoo Sponsored Search accounts was announced. So starting from early December Internet advertisers who has an account at Yahoo shouldn’t expect having access to the following columns and tools of an old interface:

• Top 5 Max Bids
• Position
• Your Cost
• View Bids Tool

To give the advertisers opportunity to forecast the ads’ estimated positions and needed bids Yahoo implements the “Estimated Average Position” function (estimates the possible position of your ad based on your maximum bid compared to other advertisers bids) and “Bid Range for Top Positions” function (displays bid required to stay on the top of SERP for each of your keywords).

Hope the changes announce make the Yahoo Sponsored Search interface more functional and convenient in use. The only troublesome aspect coming along with the upgrade so far is that Grandfathered Bids of $0.01 (somebody still might have within Sponsored Search account) will be enforced to $0.1. Though I don’t really think that lots of that low bids are still used.