A little known Yahoo Search tool is (still) in beta

Posted by Jim Stroud

October 10, 2007

Have you heard of Yahoo Mindset? Its not exactly new as it has been around for a while now, at least since last year. I do not know if it will ever hit the prime time as a fron page search function, but its certainly blogworthy.

Here is a quick snippet from the Yahoo Mindset website.

1. What does this Mindset demo do?

It allows you to sort search results for your query into commercial or non-commercial (informational) results, based on whether you’re shopping or seeking information.

2. What do you mean by commercial and non-commercial (informational)?

Commercial implies that the primary purpose of a given page is to sell you something. Informational implies that the primary purpose of the page is to provide information related to your search.

3. That sounds vague. Aren’t many web pages a combination of commercial and informational?

Yes, that’s why we assign each page a relatively continuous score ranging from -2 (most commercial) to +2 (most informational). Pages scored 0 are a balance of commercial and informational.

4. How are these scores assigned?

We’re using machine learning technology developed here at Yahoo! Research to score web results.

Okay, so blah, blah, blah… Let’s do a few resume searches with it. Okay, so let’s do a comparison-contrast view. I perform the following search on the regular Yahoo homepage:

intitle:resume "software architect" education c# -jobs

Here is the screenshot:

As always, good results from Yahoo! Now let’s do the same search on Yahoo Mindset.

I scroll the bar all the way to the left, which is the “Shopping” side of the bar. I expected to see lots of results from job sites (I did see one or two), but I also noticed download links, books for sale and notices of technical conferences. Okay, I suppose that’s cool. Now, let’s move the bar all the way to the right.

Umm… no big difference. (Bummer) I was hoping that I would screen out everything else but resumes, but no such luck. I also noticed that Yahoo Mindset returned 166 , whereas the same search on Yahoo’s homepage brought back 261 results and almost all of them are resumes.

So, I guess all that means that Yahoo Mindset is still in beta for a reason; (Sigh) so continue on with the Yahoo homepage.

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Comments

Comment by anon on October 12, 2007 @ 4:51 pm

Yes, I heard about this. Didn’t Shally demo this last month at the SourceCon conference that you emceed?

Comment by Jim Stroud on October 12, 2007 @ 5:18 pm

I don’t remember if Shally did or not. Either way, I’ve known about Mindset for some time; actually prior to writing my book - “The Howling Yahoo Commandos.”

I can assure you (or anyone reading my materials) that I develop my own content and do not steal from anyone else; which is what I think your comment is asserting. (Or am I mistaken?)

And for the benefit of that special someone reading this message, I have heard this consistently and from various sources and it makes me laugh everytime. (Smile)