The Biz of Coding

Mindset — Yahoo Inc Serves Improved Web Search Results Based on your Intent

by Ujwal Tickoo on April 13th, 2006

I have been recently playing with Yahoo Mindset — a super cool ongoing project at Yahoo Next. What Yahoo Mindset does is quite simple but very powerful. It does a normal web search but then presents a search results page (SRP) that allows you to sort results based on how you move a slider on a scale which reads Shopping at one end and Researching on the other.

You finally get better sorted web search results based on the intent you have — and you control not only how the results get sorted but how much tweaking you want with the sorting! No more messy privacy intrusion by Google to personalize my search results. Thank you Google. Yahoo! has a better idea about serving me improved search results without reading my email on my laptop and I guess without knowing the size of my underwear.

To be able to sort your web search results, Yahoo assigns scores to web pages based on whether they are more sales or more information dissemination oriented. Yahoo! Mindset basically assumes that a web search is either intended to research and know more or find more shopping related information about something.

Clearly shopping and research interests are two extremes of a cotinuum and your intent could be midway — both commerical and research based. Voila! Yahoo Mindset gives you a clean slider to sort your results accordingly.

To start you enter a keyword and press "Search the Web". You get a normal search results page (SRP) with the slider placed mid-way between shopping and research. The rankings of search results are also based on the sliders mid-way position.

I did a web search for the keyword "self actualization" and below is a picture of my SRP with a neat slider to sort my results.

My interest right now is to research the topic of self actualization rather than buy a book on it and I will move the slider a bit toward research to show you what I get (in my next post)…

Post 1 of 4. To continue…

POSTED IN: Google, MSN, Microsoft, Privacy, Search Engines, Yahoo, Yahoo Mindset