Yahoo! Research Labs Releases Yahoo! Mindset
- Posted May 27th, 2005 at 8:59 am by Yahoo! Search
- Categories: News/Announcements
Sometimes at Yahoo! Research Labs, an idea is just too exciting to keep to ourselves. Mindset is just such an idea. Today we’ve posted it on Yahoo! Next for you to try out and let us know what you think.
What is Mindset? A new twist on search that uses machine learning technology to give you a choice: View Yahoo! Search results sorted according to whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources).
Sometimes you want to buy stuff and sometimes you just want to do research. In a typical search page, results point to commercial pages that are mixed together with non-commercial pages, so it’s harder to find the type of information you’re looking for. Mindset is our attempt to help solve that problem.
Through the use of machine learning for text classification, we try to classify each web page in the top 100 search results for a query. Then we sort those results according to the preference you set. Mindset uses an intuitive slider in the interface, so you can set the bias for commercial vs. non-commercial results. Often, we come across a web page that hasn’t been classified yet. In those cases, Mindset tries to classify that web page in the background, so it’ll be classified along with the rest of the results next time you do the same query.
A full description of Mindset, what it is, and how it works, can be found on the Yahoo! Research Labs Mindset pages.
When using Mindset, please bear in mind it’s not a finished product. We think of it more as a technology demo and an ongoing research project. We want to determine whether: a) the underlying technology is effective and b) you like it. That’s why we’re very keen to know what you think and invite you to discuss it on our Mindset forums.
Try Mindset and then share a piece of your mind with us.
Bernard Mangold
Sr. Director, Yahoo! Research Labs
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Works very well for me so far
I searched for “Titanic”…as expected I got an Amazon link to the dvd of the movie when moving the button to the left and a list of historical sites mentioning the Titanic when moving the button to the right.
Very smart
Now THAT is search innovation and it is sorely needed. As I mentioned in my blog post about Mindset, this is the kind of thing that wakes me up and gets rid of the search boredom. Good job, Yahoo! Best core search innovation in a long time.
Too bad it heavily relies on ActiveX, I usually surf with it disabled. I tried it in Firefox though, and it looks promissing and impressive.
BTW Didn’t MSN had something similar?
The message boards seem to have a problem. I get a blank page when I try to Reply to a message.
Really very good! I hope it does not stop at this and further improvements are planned. Like Daniel above points out it has some display problems with the text ads in Opera, but works well otherwise.
Pretty cool. Works on firefox/unix, and works well. Would some kind of XmlHttp data transfer be better than just loading all results into the page at once? Oh well, IANAWD (web dev).
As Search Engine Watch blog points out, Yahoo has offered a form of this technology since 2003.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050527-155712
Yahoo Smart Sort
http://shopping.yahoo.com/smartsort/
I love yahoo! services but this trend I’m seeing yahoo! ignoring non MS users more and more with more Active-X usagage is very sad. I use Opera all the time, please let us use Yahoo! services too from alternative sources. FF or Mac etc
Ugh. For the record folks, this service *doesn’t* use ActiveX. It uses Javascript, and IE uses ActiveScripting to support Javascript, but Javascript is not in any way tied to MS. It works fine with Firefox on any platform. I’m using it on Linux right now.
I assume you are trying to generalize the system so that users can provide any two intent criteria.
In the mean time, I would like another demo search where the intent criteria are “Conservative and Liberal.” This would be very interesting for news and Weblog postings.
Keep up the good work.
This would work better if you provided some kind of notification that the page was reloading the results when the slider is moved; at first, I thought the system was incompatible with my browser because it didn’t appear to do anything when the slider was released.
mmmm sounds alot like Google Suggest Beta in Google labs! i gotta check this out and play with it until i get blue in the face… just like GAIM and GIMP and TrueCrypt all open source baby! dont forget Bit Torrent too
RealSEO.net posted an article about Y!Mindset in the year 2005
That’s the function I longed for! And that works!! Thank You~~and pls keep the good work on!! =)
Right now, it looks to just be reordering the top 100 results for any search. Takes the top 100 – reshuffles them depending on where the searcher sets the slider, but I didn’t find the right results for what i was looking for at all. I guess they’re still working on it.
So will every day Joe Schmoe users find this helpful? Or is this another product being developed only to entice the uber corporate users who are generally the same ones building it?
We’re hoping to find out if everyday users will find it useful. That’s why it’s here, open to the public.
What do *you* think?
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Mindset is a brilliant and useful idea!
(notice shortly after, Google started adding a link to Scholar on its Homepage)
yes mindset search engine is an amazing one….
i made a search for a movie director by giving his name as keyword..
when i move to right i got his interviews…
whwn i moved to left.. i was stunned and amazed.. because i got ashopping page to buy a dvd of that directors movie… wow
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my yahoo ID is dolly_cool42@yahoo.com
u can send the information to my new yahoo id:dolly_cool5@yahoo.com
Can’t wait to try. I’m xtremely Research Needy& possibly interesting combo of average jo user, newbie, shopper, & intellectually curious. May be of use. lyrigal
Can I use w/o a desk or laptop using only mobile pda for now?
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good work! can this be called concept search? instead of searching “words” per se, the next generation of search engine should be able to search concept, ie. the context or meaning of the words. northernlight used to have a feature similar the google’s suggest, which would provide a list of selection for the users to narrow his search. this is a idea which yahoo should explore.
I was really excited to read about this new release. Always loved yahoo services and now I get to customize it for my prefrences. Great job as always Yahoo!!
This concept is somehow close to what I was thinking for quite a long time…..but in a different way. The search engines bots pick-up the sites according to the density of words in the site related to search word….In Y!Q its adjust according to the ‘whether they are more commercial or more informational’ i.e.- the bot first pick up the words which defines the nature of website (like Sale, buy now, learn, about, services, history etc.) and then sort out according to User!
But I would like to suggest that, Yahoo may introduce two new MetaTags different from existing one. The first MetaTag for Context (2 words) of website and second one for Related words (4to6 only).
Examples:
Examples:
1) CNN News website
2) M.I.T Website
3)Ebay Website
Now Incase of some educational library website which site context is similar to M.I.T website but serves different purpose, the ‘Context’ Meta content changes and ‘Rwords’ remains the same.
i.e-
In ‘Context’ Meta the first word is the main words and second words act as sub-context word to refine the context of website!
We can use more words in both the cases of ‘Context’ and ‘Rword’ Meta, but increase in numbers of words mean decrease in the precision of search……..Well thats watt I was thinking, hope you intelligent people make some sense out of it!
GoodDay
amit Dixit (yahoo-info_tdf)
CGIndia (blog)
WebSoup (blog)
is yahoo!a company that was simply at the right place at the right time,or are many of its services innovation truely unique?explain it..
Nice idea, can see it’s still in the beta stage. I tried to search for “Beetle” and slid the slider all teh way to the right because I wanted to see if I would get zero hits on Volkswagen. No such luck, I still got mostly Volkswagen hits rather than for the insect!
Great feature! I’m very suspicous how good it will work with a bigger testing surveillance.
From the reading of comments it seems very exciting. I will some other time go for topics it is definite.
Actually I maintain two blog sites of my own, and many times I see that Yahoo! dosent mark my most relevant blog at the top most results. Instead I see my less used blog at top results.
Other engines have some techniques which make my frequently updated and more visited blog in first 10 results when an appropriate query is passed to the search engine.
And my blog is covered under a Creative Commons License, but it does not appear under CC-search of Yahoo!. Do we need some any special requirement to qualify as a CC content. Its covered under creativecommons.org, ND-2.5 license.
I would be glad to discuss this fact in detail if Yahoo! team wishes to interact with me.
Thanks.
just to have peoples for buisness contact
Question…anyone know of a webpage that shows Kylie Minoque’s Post Breast Cancer hair cut. I hear it is similar to a curly pixie. Our resemblance to each other is uncanny.(HA)..I am anxiously awaiting a picture to take with me to the salon!
I tried Yahoo!Mindset demo & I think it is just exellent.Just one qoestion when does it is going to launch in India I hope very soon
works nicely for me so far
Y is the greatest in making continuous improvement
I will try this new feature very soon.
This way web users have separate features when buying or researching……