Are You In The Mindset For Yahoo?

The intent for this is an intent-driven search. It will allow users to decide the type of information they need. The SEO folks have been fooling around with this idea but Yahoo is the first to go live with this beta. I think it's nice offering because most search engines base their listings at least in part on the number of hits a website gets and the volume of sites out there. Whether it will sell is still up in the air.

Mindset seems fairly simple to maneuver through. The big feature on this over much of the other stuff is a slide to adjust the levels of research versus a commercial or shopping side.

So, ones picks a topic, say dual core processors. With the slide set in the middle, the first thing that comes up is a story about the topic in InfoWorld, then a PCWorld story and then a reference in Wikipedia.

When I adjust the slide to the left or the commercial side, the first thing to come up is a story I wrote on duel core processors back in April. Next is a link directly to processors manufacturer AMD on what multi core processors are and their function.

If the slide moves to the right or the research side, stories from 3DBuzz and ITFreaks Internet magazines come up. The other thing is if I click on the links, then it rearranges the order of things. My story, mentioned above with the bar back on the left, moves to 4th place and reference to Dealtime comes up showing the pricing for the various processors.

As far as application goes, meaning how will it be useful in the real world, it's purely speculation at this point. I think I'd like to see more intellectual pieces come up on the research side of things in some cases. If one types in Henry II of England, all you get are encyclopedia references for the first page. Skimming through the pages, I also noticed a few hit to Henry Ford II too. If you go with the hot topic you get mostly newsmagazine and newspaper articles about what's happening 25 years later or in some cases 30 years later. It would be nice to see more academic listings for these topics.

If you go to the shopping side, the first thing to come up under Watergate is a link to the Watergate Hotel. With Henry II, Amazon got the first hit with a book about the English monarch. I think the shopping side is pretty obvious, but if this is to be an intent driven search, I think for the research side, more detail should be given.

The real limitation would seem to be the limitation of any search engine and that would be the pages already existing which in some cases are almost non-existent. Recent studies attempted to document the size of the Internet based on search engine data and the biggest telling fact were the pages that weren't there and I think that could be relevant in something like the Mindset search engine feature.

Overall, I think this is a great idea but I think it needs some room to grow. I think others might go this direction, depending on the success of feature. A lot of its success, particularly with the research side, will depend not just on how much information can be picked up but on how much unique, relevant information from even academic resources can be picked up.

Courtesy : http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/searchinsider/wpn-49-20050601AreYouIntheMindsetforYahoo.html