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June 22, 2005
Yahoo Mindset: New Shopping and Research Tool.
By Scott Goodyear
Yahoo has introduced a new beta search service called Mindset. Mindset is a further attempt toward the true personalization of search engine results beyond local. Currently when you perform a normal Yahoo web search, you are left with search results that are based on the proprietary Yahoo search algorithm. With Mindset you can further tweak these results using a slider so that the results can be geared toward a more commercial/shopping based search or a more research/informational need. There are even gradients in between purely shopping and purely research search preferences.
When you use the slider to further clarify your mix of commercial vs. shopping results, the page immediately re-orders the results list. Interestingly, on the left hand side of each listing there is also a ranking number that follows the default rankings of the modified search rankings.
According to Yahoo's Mindset FAQ / information page, site rankings are based primarily on 'machine learning'. Thus several sample data sets from human ranking attempts were used as a baseline before the Yahoo ranking robot was let out on it's own for determining site rankings along the research/shopping continuum. So... when you see some obviously commercial/sales related websites in 'research', be aware that things will likely improve with time and further tweaking by the Yahoo staff.
Being a beta, I'm sure that there will be several other tweaks to this engine that that will help to further improve the experience. It would be great to eventually set a default search preference via your Yahoo member login. At this time, logging into your Yahoo member account did not appear to offer any ability to set customization preferences. It also would be interesting to see more continuums in which you could narrow searches down even further since not everything in search comes down to shopping and research; what about entertainment vs. research, varying degrees of local vs. global, movies vs. music, etc.?
Mindset provides insight into things to come from the search engine industry. It also goes to show that optimization around a specific topic area along with proper placement of your keywords and phrases can and will have a large impact on site ranking. Understanding how latent semantic indexing works could have a larger impact on ranking a site across multiple types of searches, as well as exclude a site from searches that would not provide as many qualified hits/leads. As this type of idea based search evolves, surely SEO marketers that focus on developing in depth content that is geared toward what the search engines are looking for will be the big winners.
Test Mindset and see what you think. If you have more time, also check out some of their other beta products at next.yahoo.com or provide feedback for this product in their Yahoo Mindset Forums.
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