What is Yahoo! Brewing in its Lab? - Just Looking, or Looking to Buy?
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It is on Yahoo! Research that one can find information about Mindset, which Yahoo! describes as “intent-driven search.” Mindset uses advanced algorithms explained in a research paper published by Yahoo! researchers in March to train a machine-based classifier. The classifier separates a page based on whether it is mainly commercial (trying to sell you something) or not. The idea was to create a classifier which is accurate but still fast enough to classify web pages on the fly, so the user won’t notice any effect on the speed of search results returned.
The demo of Mindset, which is available on Yahoo! Next (but also linked to appropriately on Yahoo! Research) takes advantage of a slider. Leaving the slider in the middle returns results in the “usual” order for a Yahoo! search. Move the slider to the right, for “researching,” and your results will be ordered with the ones that score highest as “informational” at the top. Move it all the way to the left, and your results will be ordered with the most “commercial” ones at the top. There are, of course, continuums between each position.
For instance, leaving the slider in the middle while searching for “CPU” turned up a review site first, followed by the Freedom CPU website (apparently an effort to bring open source to the world of microelectronics), followed by some sites that defined the term CPU, more that reviewed CPUs, and others that explained how a CPU works. Moving the slider all the way to the right bumped definition and “how does it work?” sites right to the top, with CPU-World at the top followed by Wikipedia’s definition of CPU. In this case, it’s a subtle difference, but not entirely insignificant.
Moving the slider all the way to the left, however, gives us very different results. We start getting results from Newegg, Computer Geeks Discount Outlet, and many other stores. It isn’t perfect by any means; the fourth result was for California Pacific University, which probably wouldn’t have turned up if I had typed in “central processing unit” rather than just the initials. Still, it is a very nice little beta, and could become quite helpful to the creation of customized search.
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