Effect of User Mindset on Relevant Search Results

Several years back, Yahoo! released a product called Yahoo! Mindset which dealt with the challenge of differing mindsets that users might have for the same search query. Yahoo! Mindset would essentially reorder the search results with a machine learning system based on a user’s mindset or orientation. The tool was fairly simple and intuitive to understand, utilizing a sliding bar that categorized the user’s search mindset as a “shopping” mindset or a “research” mindset. Sliding the bar all the way to the left for “shopping” would produce a search results page for that keyword that was oriented predominantly for those who might be shopping for products/services for that particular keyword. Sliding the bar all the way to the right for “research” for the same search query would produce a different set of results that were predominantly “research” or informational-oriented results for the same keyword query and topic in question.

Now, I just loved this tool. Reordering the search results based on varying mindsets was incredibly useful for me.  There’s no doubt that user mindset has a HUGE effect on the relevancy of search results for users, but Yahoo! Mindset is now defunct and the website is currently unavailable. (That’s why I didn’t link back to it because the link to Yahoo! Mindset is currently offline.)

Now, some people might think that this is way too much to ask of a common user doing a search, which may be true. But being able to reorder search results based on mindset is so critically important for a number of different reasons…

First, it gives the user much better search results than the simple standard search results page. Secondly, the results for advertisers of being able to segment out researchers away from the active shoppers would be huge. This pre-sorted advertising inventory would be worth so much more to advertisers who are looking to sell products. Follow the logic here … give search advertisers pre-sorted inventory of “shoppers”, advertisers bid up the value of the inventory because it’s worth more to them, search engines get higher effective CPM’s for their search results pages, coupled with higher ROI for advertisers. I’m not going to overstate the obvious here because it all just makes way, way too much sense.

But Yahoo! Mindset doesn’t appear to exist anymore. It might have been shelved because of lack of interest. While I’m admittedly not the brightest bulb on the search engine tree, mindset orientation in search is conspicuously absent from search functionality as a whole.

Why?

Am I missing something here?

Tagged as: Search Engine Marketing

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