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June 6, 2005Yahoo Mindset: Refrigerator KeywordYahoo has introduced a new search tool, Yahoo Mindset, which uses sliders to re-mix the main search results, based on the user's location on the shopping-research continuum. Ken "Hey" Norton has some interesting thoughts on this kind of user interface, and a lengthy discussion is also taking place at Greg Linden's blog. I might add inferface comments to one or both of those posts, but my focus here is the following question: is this an example of a "horizontal" search engine having the answer to vertical search? For an apples-to-apples comparison, I ran the primary flavors of Yahoo Minset (default, all-shopping, all-research) against the pesky "refrigerator" keyword. (see: Become vs. Google - Refrigerator Keyword). continued: First Impression: this is not the be-all, end-all answer to engines like Become.com. The shopping results are not particularly authoritative for a category-level keyword. The difference could be that Become.com applies a shopping-oriented algorithm against an entire index of shopping-oriented listings. Yahoo Mindset applies their shopping-flavored criteria against a tiny fraction of their main search results. In many cases, the subset used for Yahoo Mindset is less than 1% of total results. - What if the main index is imbalanced? i.e. What is there are too many sites from either Shopping or Research, and they crowd out the most outstanding results from the other end of the spectrum? - What if the main index is too... bland? i.e. What if too many sites that are not strongly Shopping or Research crowd out the most outsanding results from both ends of the spectrum?
Yahoo Mindset: Refrigerator Keyword
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