Yahoo has announced the release of their Mindset Beta, Yahoo’s Intent driven search.. Yahoo Mindset offers a slide bar tool you can use after you enter a keyword to indicated the degree to which you are looking for commercial information (shopping) or research information (non-shopping). Yahoo will then attempt to sort / filter their organic results to meet your needs.

The Beta has been posted on Yahoo! Next. Yahoo's site for posting beta tools they are playing with. There you will find Mindset, Music Search Engine, Yahoo's Beta Gift Finder, and more!

The question that begs to be asked is how does Yahoo determine the focus of a page to be commercial verses informational. Here is what their FAQs have to say:

Question:
What do you mean by commercial and non-commercial (informational)?

Answer:
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.

Question:
That sounds vague. Aren't many web pages a combination of commercial and informational?

Answer:
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.

Question:
How are these scores assigned?

Answer:
We're using machine learning technology developed here at Yahoo! Research Labs to score web results.

Question:
Are you confident that the scoring in this demo is correct?

Answer:
Remember, this demo is a work in progress, put together by scientists to test new ideas and techniques. To start the scoring process, a small team of humans scored pages manually to develop the "seed set" of pages on which machine learning would be based. For the seed set, we didn't rigorously require everyone to use the same scoring approach, so the scoring results may need some fine-tuning.

Question:
Does this suggest that the whole demo is gibberish?

Answer:
We don't think so. The scoring may not be perfect, but it's good enough to get us started. Once we get more rigorous in our approach for manually scoring the seed set (perhaps by inviting smart users like you to do the scoring), automatic scoring should improve rapidly. Meantime, you're invited to play with the demo and share your feedback

More FAQs are available at http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/faq.php.

This will be interesting to watch as we learn more about how the Yahoo Machine determins if a page is mostly commercial or informational. Other slide bars might appear in the future, it would be interesting to have a dynamic slide bar that would appear to help determine what you are looking for when a search could mean two very different things. Take a search for Delta for example. A slide bar could come up to slide between travel and home building. A search for Alexandria could come up with a slide bar listing Alexandria Virginia, Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, Kentucky, and Egypt.

Slidebars could become a great way to "refocus" a search, but if users are not actually typing in a new keyword, the question would be what terms are the search engines using to pull new relevant ads as searches are further refined.

It doesn't look like the current mindset beta is changing the ads at all, this could be a major mistake on their part. The slidebar just readjusts the organic listings on the page without affecting the ads.