Yahoo! has launched a beta of a new tool which looks to have some serious potential. Called Mindset, the tool essentially allows users to sort their search results based on whether or not they are commercial or non-commercial.
Whilst this sounds pretty simple as a premise, it is also incredibly useful. How many times have you been searching on Google, only to be confounded by the number of shopping websites that appear to be in your results?
The tool lets you decide, by the use of a simple slider mechanism, if you want to display commercial or non-commercial information, i.e. are you shopping or seeking information. Obviously it works both ways, so if you are shopping the tool can also enhance your web searching experience.
The system works by assigning web pages a relatively continuous score ranging from -2 (most commercial) to +2 (most informational). Pages scored at 0 are seen as a balance of commercial and informational. The scores are assigned by machine learning technology that Yahoo! developed at it's research labs.
Yahoo! is keen to stress that this is a technical demonstration only, and should not be seen as a finished product in any way shape or form. However, it certainly looks promising, and we'd encourage you to go and have a look for yourselves and see what you think. Let us know in our comments forum below.
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