Despite a rocky 2008, Yahoo hopes to get back on the path of success.  It scored a coup at CES, inserting its widgets product into almost every major manufacturers' next generation internet-connected TVs.  Under new leadership, and currently reorganizing, Yahoo is looking to regain its footing and bring new fire to its battle with Google.

According to senior company officials speaking with the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo will roll out some crucial software offerings today.  Yahoo is set to release a new suite of internet tools which will help advertisers better target their customers.

Yahoo still leads the online advertising market, but it has been under increasing pressure to ramp up its efforts as mergers or partnerships with Microsoft Corp, Google Inc, and Time Warner Inc's AOL have come and gone.  As Google continues to lead it in market share, advertising revenue is fast shifting towards Google.

The new Yahoo suite will provide targeted graphical ads, based on users browsing history.  The engine takes into account web searches, pages visited, and text typed on the page.  So if you search "beagles" on DailyTech's search bar, you might get a shiny new ad for your local kennel.

Another key tool will roll out later this month, which brings new text advertisement tools to the table.  The new text ad tools will allow marketers to target users by age or gender.  They will also allow them to target ads for a specific time of the day. 

Joanne Bradford, Yahoo's senior vice president of U.S. revenue and market development believes that Yahoo's size gives it a marketing advantage.  She states, "Targeting a site with a couple hundred thousand users...I don't call that targeting. I call that wasted effort.  Size does matter."

A key to Yahoo's success though will be to attract more customers to its web search service, which will in turn provide it with more valuable data.  Yahoo faces a tough uphill battle, though regaining search market share against Google or third place competitor Microsoft, which has literally offered users large amounts of money to use its search.