You know how you try to do some research on the Web, and when you type in a term on your favorite search engine, you get a ton of links related to buying stuff? Bleh.
Totally randomly, I stumbled across Yahoo! Mindset, a demo from Yahoo Research Labs. It uses machine learning applied to the problem of text classification.
Check it out:
Notice how each search term has a little colored bar that tells you if the link is considered more shopping oriented, or research oriented. And you can twiddle the slider to re-rank the results, without a page reload. Sweet.
There’s a FAQ too.
Pretty cool! Who doesn’t get a thrill out of the on the fly adjustment of the results? I did. Seems very Yahoo! turned Google turned Yahoo!
I tried to capture my expectation of how this would work before hitting submit. And I expected/hoped either end of the spectrum to be “the best place for”, either research or retail. So I jammed the little slider to the stops. The Powerbook search was especially interesting, since I had stronger expectations about what should appear and Mindset went wildly wide of the mark.
Instead of “best place for”, the extremes are more like, “most exclusively for”. So for most people, they’d probably find “the best place for” to be either slightly right or slightly left of center. My vote: neat, but confusing.