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When Google first started pounding its chest about not being evil, one practice in particular was the target of its engineers' self-righteous anger: Overture's practice of mixing advertisers' links in with regular search results. Yahoo, after it bought Overture four years ago, continued the practice. But now, years later, Yahoo is finally making it explicit that some high-ranking search results are paid for by advertisers. Why make the change now? At the time, Google and other search engines beat up Yahoo over the sponsored links. (Yahoo defends the paid placement as a means of guaranteeing the most deserving site appears at the top of results rather than allowing other sites to game search terms.) Since then, Yahoo's dwindling search market share has given Google little reason to continue the fight: Why kick someone when they're already down? Which raises the question: Do Yahoo execs now think that they're a contender in search, so they need to clean up their act? Or is this just a sign that it takes Yahoo three years to do anything?