Ad Network Essentials: How Advertisers and Publishers Connect Through Different Platforms (Past and Present)
Advertisers may feel like they know the ad platforms they use daily inside out, however, in order to fully understand how these networks work it is important to understand the publisher side as well and how these networks are utilized on that end.
Names and functionality tend to change on both sides, so the overview provided below is to be understand as both – a snapshot as of now and a bit of ad network history, as some of their former names are provided as well.
When working with professionals who are in this business for a while, you may come across these legacy terms in their language and even in the systems they use, so it’s important to be aware of what these mean.
Google, Bing and Yahoo Ad Networks: Advertiser to Publisher Mapping
(As of late 2026. Includes historic options and legacy terms.)
| Network Name for Advertisers |
Network Name for Publishers |
|
| Google (algorithm based) |
Google Ads – Display Network (fka. Content Network) |
Google Adsense for Content |
| Google (keyword based) |
Google Ads -Search Partners (fka. Adwords) |
Google Adsense for Search (Standard & Premium) |
| Google (domain name based) (phased out in 2026) |
Google Ads – Display Network (use managed placements) | Google Adsense for Domains (fka. Domain Park) |
| Bing (Microsoft) (keyword based) |
Microsoft Advertising Search Partners (fka Bing Search Partners) |
Microsoft Advertising (fka Bing Ads feed) Microsoft Search Network |
| Yahoo, inc. (all countries except Japan) (keyword based) |
Microsoft Advertising Search Partners (fka Bing Search Partners fka. Yahoo Search advertising aka.”The Panama Accounts”) |
Yahoo Partner Ads (YPA) (fka. Overture) |
| Yahoo Japan (keyword based) |
Yahoo search Ads (fka. The Panama Accounts) |
Yahoo Japan (fka. Overture) |
| Google Ad serving and campaign measurement |
Campaign Manager 360 Formerly DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA), then DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM) and Campaign Manager. Part of Google Marketing Platform. |
Google Ad Manager Brought together DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) in 2018. Separate from Google Marketing Platform. |
| Google Advertising and analytics suite |
Google Marketing Platform Introduced in 2018 to bring together DoubleClick Digital Marketing and Google Analytics 360 Suite. Includes Campaign Manager 360, Display & Video 360 (formerly DoubleClick Bid Manager), Search Ads 360 (formerly DoubleClick Search) and Studio. |
No direct publisher-side equivalent. Google Ad Manager is a separate publisher platform. |
Legacy term explanation:
Overture:
the former name of the Yahoo ads feed. It had their own platform and did not prominently mention it was the own branding.
Yahoo & Yahoo Search Ads:
Yahoo offered their own search ad network to advertisers back in the day, similar to Google and MIcrosoft today, these were all migrated to Microsoft Bing (with the exception of Yahoo Japan). While users are still able to visit yahoo domains (yahoo.com or yahoo.de) and run search queries on them, both, the organic and paid results returned are being served by bing.com and are identical to running the query on bing from with in the same geolocation.
Panama Accounts:
When Yahoo migrated their ad network from Yahoo to Bing, they did this market by market over a duration of several months. They called the accounts still being on the yahoo legacy-platform “Panama Accounts”. I believe Australia was the last one to be migrated, many months after the process had been started.
Yahoo Japan has been a completely independent entity long before that, so it never was part of this migration process.
Google Content Network:
Legacy name of what’s now the Display Network. The legacy name still exists on the publisher side, where the feed can be referred to as Adsense for Content.
Where do Search Partners ads appear and what is triggering them?
They can appear anywhere where search-ads ad feeds are embedded, in particular:
Search engines that do not have their own ad network, such as yahoo.com, duckduckgo.com or startpage.com
Content Websites embedding keyword based search feeds
Important:
While “Search Partners” traffic is always keyword-based, it is not always search-based as the name would suggest. The keywords triggering these ads can be hardcoded on published pages without any search at all (or ignoring the search query if there was an actual on-site search took place).
