alwaysthinking - 2:34 am on Jul 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

For those doubters that want some evidence that Yahoo will be implementing their own contextual ad program soon:

I present "Exhibit A"

Here's a very interesting referral that I saw in my logs on Date/Time: 7/28/2005 1:32:46 PM (with a previous visit on - Date of Last Visit: 7/26/2005 5:28:04 PM)

[lccmtools.corp.yahoo.com...]
p%3A%2F%2FwwWebmasterWorldebsitename.com&showads=SubmitQuery

(of course "mywebsitename" was in the place of "WebmasterWorldebsitename" ... but I think you get the drift)

Notice the "lccmtools","corp.yahoo.com" ,"cstest" and "&showads"

I've seen all types of traffic from Yahoo, but never anything like this... What else could it be except Yahoo testing their contextual ad program? I suppose they could have the page (my web site's front page) somehow framed like Ask Jeeves does, and their test script might produce whatever appropriate test ads they may have.

Naturally I couldn't connect to anything when I attempted to access the link in my browser... It must be on their internal secure network... my guess.

Quite a few months ago, like many others I suppose, I signed up for Yahoo! news updates on their contextual ad program - but have not yet received any information from Yahoo. I supplied Yahoo with this particular domain because it does rather well in Yahoo for relevant keyphrase searches, but has AdSense on the pages at the moment,

So that would be how Yahoo would know to run their tests on that domain's front page, if indeed that is what they are doing. Other than that, I'm just "reading into" the text in the link taht I see in my logs... pieces of text like "tool,corp.yahoo,test, & showads" ... what the HECK else could it be?

Has anyone else seen such a referral?