Yahoo's New Split-Personality Search Engine

OK, enough about Google and the beta products on its Google Labs page. Yahoo has an uncannily similar skunkworks outpost called Yahoo Next--imitation is the sincerest form of search-engine competition--and it, too, is fun to rummage around in.

At the moment, Yahoo Next is playing host to everything from a beta of a new version of Yahoo Messenger to a travel search engine called Yahoo Travel FareChase. But its most intriguing offering is a test version of Yahoo Mindset, which showed up today.

Mindset is a search engine of two minds--it's designed to be used for both shopping searches and less commerce-oriented research. Once you've searched, a slider gives you fine-grain control over whether you want the results organized with shopping or research results at the top, or with a sort order that's somewhere in between:



It's a nifty idea I haven't seen attempted in quite this way before. I tried a bunch of searches and found that the results were, well, beta-like: Sometimes I could see exactly why Yahoo decided a result was shopping-related or more of a pure research resource, and other times, there was less obvious rhyme or reason to its thinking.

Shove the slider all the way to "researching," and you're likely to find pages from the Wikipedia near the top of your results; move it over to "shopping," and the first few sites may be places that sell whatever it was you were searching for. Nudge the slider to the middle, and the results may skew towards sites that have both research and buying aspects. For instance, when I searched for "PC" with the slider in dead center, PCWorld.com was result #1...which kind of makes sense. We are a site for folks who buy technology stuff; we're not, however, an online store.

But Mindset's most obvious weakness in my trial run was this: The sites that show up near the top may fit the bill as either "shopping" or "research" as appropriate, but they often didn't seem to be the most logical, big-name contenders. For instance, when I searched for "Dell Computer" with the slider set to "shopping," I kind of expected to get the site of...well, Dell Computer. Instead, a pricing page (at Yahoo itself) for Dell-compatible RAM was up top. Link #2 was to Dell's tech support site (which sounds more like "researching" to me), and link #3 was the first one that pointed to Dell's e-commerce area.

But hey, Mindset is accompanied by a page with lots of disclaimers that it's merely an experimental demo, along with other interesting information about the technology behind the service. What you don't get is a clear idea of whether this precise technology will be baked into Yahoo itself at some point, or whether it's more of an exploration of the concept of search engines whose results can be tweaked to suit different goals. (Yahoo calls this "Intent-Driven Search.")

Kudos to Yahoo for letting us fiddle around with Mindset in its current form. If you give it a whirl, let me know what you think.