Yahoo Mindset – Intent Driven Search

Yahoo Mindset is “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).”

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.

You control the slider to decide how you want the results sorted. The midpoint of the slider represents the default order of results matching Yahoo! Search web results. As you move the slider right, toward “researching” or left toward “shopping” the results are automatically re-sorted.

There are blue and orange bars under the results. A longer colored bar represents a higher absolute score for the result, and the more definitively commercial (blue on the left) or informational (orange on the right) result.

This Mindset demo is an example of machine learning applied to the problem of text classification. Text classification refers to the problem of classifying documents automatically into different subject categories. Machine learning is especially useful for applying human-like behavior to sets of data so large that it would be infeasible for humans to do the work.