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Yahoo! Releases New Search Tool
rcrc writes "Yahoo! Research Labs has recently released a new search tool that gives the opportunity to the user to choose whether they are looking for informational sites, or shopping sites, based upon a slider bar. This tool is currently in beta and more information can be found in the FAQ." From the article: "With the slider in the middle position, only the default Yahoo! Search sort is used. When the slider is at either end, only the secondary commercial/non-commercial sort is used. But when the slider is anywhere in between, Yahoo! Mindset presents a blend of the two sorting systems."
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Spammy!
#DD
If I slide this thing all the way to the right does it mean that there'll be no paid positioning search results?
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Inside look at Yahoo! next
http://next.yahoo.com/ this one is cool http://farechase.yahoo.com/ try this http://movies.yahoo.com/recommendations/
Get your fucking hair cut, it looks like your mother fucked a monkey
I like this idea, assuming it will work. I hate it when I'm looking for drivers for something and all I can find are webites trying to sell me the item. But, I think those websties are putting keywords in there so my search will find them, what's to stop them from doing that so Yahoo's slider bar finds them when I slide it all the way to 'informational'?
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you're researching shopping sites?
It'll never make it out of beta.
This (if it is working as advertised) is a great thing. Getting commercial results when information I was looking for information (or the other way around) is the biggest problem I have with google's result, to the point where the results become useless.
Sometimes when I'm searching for some new event that "just happened now" and may not be a world worthy event to get onto the news pages, I would like it if search engines would have a slider to let me choose the importance of the date in the search.
Zoom Player Lead Dev.
Does anyone else feel dirty having a slider dictate how things are sorted? I mean, when *I* want things sorted, I know exactally how it should look... and from there, where to find the results I want (Like if sorted by alphabetical order, and I am looking for something that starts with 'T').
But on another look at this, maybe it will work out well... sort of like filtering your search, but instead of eliminating things, it will move them to the bottom of the list, so you still have ALL items displayed, but really what you want is at the top.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I was thinking it was a IE/Zilla plugin. D'oh!
I've always wanted there to be an easy way to filter out the commercial bunk when looking for actual information. Hopefully this works as they say it does.
My big suggestion would be to have a customizable slider, where I could have one end of it say "research" and the other end say "let in all the assbags trying to sell me crap".
Sweet informative mod.
If it involves installing 3rd party software locally then I'll stick with the plain web interface. Why can't they do this with DHTML?
RTFA. It does work with DHTML.
Maybe you should try it before you speak? It is pure DHTML+Javascript. It actually uses AJAX to refresh the results when you slide the bar so it doesn't even have to reload the page to regenerate your new results. Pretty slick if you ask me...definitly interesting.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Well it didn't seem to help me quite much. I just did a simple search for Single Women in my area. Only turned up Russian brides. No use for internet searches yet for me. I shall return to my dark dungeon and come back again later. =p
"let me google that" - Negroiso
If it involves installing 3rd party software locally then I'll stick with the plain web interface.
It doesn't.
Why can't they do this with DHTML?
They have.
We need a new acronym... for people who haven't Tried The Fine Web application ;-)
This is where the serious fun begins.
You probably also believe Google is not an evil company, Linux is a good server-OS, Linux is ready for the desktop, Java is fast, Ruby On Rails is a usable web-framework, Firefox is a fast and secure browser and Apple-computers have a reasonable price-value ratio.
Or, to make it short: you are a typical Slashbot-homosecksuall.
www.fravia.com
www.lemonodor.com A mostly Lisp weblog
Fantastic! Now I can either slide the bar one way, and learn how to build my own atomic stockpile, or slide it the other way and simply buy one outright.
This announcement has been on Yahoo!'s search blog since last week.
The idea is awesome and it's quite easy to understand, but the devil is in the execution. I know it's still in beta, but if you try, for example, "Linux" and choose 100% researching, it comes up with:
... Cooperative Linux is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively ...
colinux.org
... DebianDesktopDevelopmentDistributionFuture of LinuxGamingGeneral newsGentooGovernmentHardwareInterviewKernelLinux vs WindowsLinux.Box NewsletterMan of ...
linux.box.sk
... If you want to set up a Linux-based firewall, there's no need to run a bloated distribution ... toward systematically auditing Windows and Linux device-driver code for flaws, security ...
linuxsecurity.com
(56) Cooperative Linux. Open this result in new window Main site. Publications. Development. Search. All the web. Only www.colinux.org. References. What is coLinux. If Linux runs on every architecture, why should another operating system be in its way? "
(16) Linux BoxOpen this result in new window
(25) Home - The Community's Center for SecurityOpen this result in new window
Which are not exactly what I would call useful research sites. Wikipedia comes in #4.
I tried to search for the term "hash". For "shopping" results it gave me things to smoke, for "research" I got a link to the hashing function on wikipedia.
Google covers 1/3rd of the web maximum
www.lemonodor.com A mostly Lisp weblog
If you do a default search for the nvidia 6800gt: http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/search.php?p=680 0gt&prssweb=Search+the+Web
the first link is a review posted by HardOCP, if you slide the bar all the way to right, HardOCP drops from the top of the list. I wonder why?
This isn't quite AJAX. As far as I've seen (looked through some of the js files), it doesn't ever use the X (XMLHttpRequest) to request new data. If you view the source, you'll see that they load all hundred results at once and then show you the top ten based on where you have the slider. What confuses me, however, is that to get to the rest of the results, you have to click on the links at the bottom of the page, which does go back to the server. Seems silly to me. They already have all the data there.
for maximum effect, the preceding post should be read monotone and at a steady cadence
Not taking your meds today?
damaged by dogma
What's the point of blending the two techniques?
Anyone have a clue?
I would use one or the other but I can't think of any situation where I would prefer blending to doing two different searches.
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
It also looks like their engine gives a higher weightage to .com sites when the slider is towards "Shopping", and to .org, .edu, .gov sites when it is towards "Researching". For most purposes, I would go with the slider at the extreme end towards "Researching", so I can exclude spam/advertisement sites. But sadly, it looks like that would skip over *many* useful sites which end in .com .
For example, http://howstuffworks.com/ seems to be categorized as a "Shopping" site, presumably due to it's suffix, and doesn't turn up with the slider at the "Researching" end.
Needs more work, IMHO.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
that's alot of sponsor results..
happy
The tool tends to work best when you don't put the slider all to one side or the other. This is presumably why they have slider.
sigs are a waste of space
Google could potentially already be doing this out of the box, if they just followed their own intentions for putting informational sites in Google, and shopping/link spam sites in Froogle.
I am sick and tired of having Google return page after page of link spam sites for a wide variety of queries. I could be looking for a specific product, or even a generic category. And the first couple of pages are flooded with those useless link farm sites that have hundreds and hundreds of affiliate links to amazon and other retailers but don't actually sell or inform about anything. Fuck 'em.
If Yahoo can fix this exploitation of results then I'm all for it.
"Yahoo releases new search tool, still in beta."
User A: Well, it's a nice concept, but can they execute it?
"Google promises the ability to walk on oceans."
User A: I'm sure they'll add features to it too. Google's the best. Wow. I love google. It gives me orgasms. Woww... And I don't even have to download porn. Wowwie
-Shaunak
1) allows one to specify wildcard matches (like Altavista did years ago) e.g. "install* problem*"
2) allows one to only search in certain languages (other than English which Google allows)
3) allows one to limit the search to certain countries, e.g.: search only sites in Germany (localization by ip does seem to be possible)
By the way, last night I discovered that Google now translates from Japanese to English as comes up with something half-intelligible.
I tried it by plugging "Toyota" in there.
With the setting bar on the research side you get opinions and reviews. With the settings on the shopping side you are directed to the manufacturers site along with their sales channels.
I am impressed and think that Google has been outdone for the first time in a while.
This could become very useful as the web is steadily getting more and more clogged with idiots wanting to sell you stuff all the time but not wanting to give you useful information on it.
There's an upper limit to the Web?
sig not found
Let me know when they make a slider with "pictures" on one end and "movies" on the other... ;)
honestly people, this is old news! Yahoo Mindset has been launched for over a month ago now and it gets slasdotted now!?!? Oh well, some people delay =)
Search it for "slashdot". Yank it all the way to the shopping end. Now explain the first result. BTW, "slashdot" does not appear in the page or its source.
Yahoo! can now charge extra for advertising in any of the result streams that is partially blended with informational results.
Presumably if one wants an ad in the information-only (!) section one has to pay an extreme premium.
That's why blend the results!
I'm just suprised that they don't charge users for the information-only results.
It'll allow you to set the research field to "my basement" to search "christmas lights" or "cross over rj45"
Presumably if one wants an ad in the information-only (!) section one has to pay an extreme premium.
You're thinking old world style advertising. Paid search is all about being able to target customers who actually want to buy something that you have to sell. I suspect the reality would be just the opposite of what you say. If I'm do an "research" search, what are the odds that I'm going to go buy something when I click on a link? Pretty rotten right? So, the advertiser doesn't get much value from it. I suspect the premium would be for people who are really looking to buy something.
sigs are a waste of space
It is a good idea, but it failed miserably on my first test. I typed viagra and set the slider all the way to research and still got a page full of "discount" offers.
... until the commercial sites figure out how to get their results at the top of the research side.
Great interface, quick response and the results seem to be more accuarate. This is certainly a common problem when searching anymore. I don't always want to buy something.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
On the shopping side you get the dating sites.
On the information side you get the encyclopedia entries.
...is a "pr0n" vs. "not pr0n" slider bar. When you only have one hand to operate the keyboard and the mouse, it's really annoying to sort past irrelevant search results.
At least this gives me the oppurtunity to filter out results from a resultset :)
Being a DBA , I know how powerful it is to sort and drill-down on the results which you get
Hope they expand and improve it. Also, wait until Google comes up with something similar
No there isn't. It is proven though that Google cannot cover more than a percentage of it.
There is a whole part of it (e.g sites that are not linked by others) that Google's algorithm cannot track.
www.fravia.com
for more info on how search engines work
www.lemonodor.com A mostly Lisp weblog
This is a great tool which I will certainly use, but why the slider? They only need 3 settings, research, shopping, both.
If I had created the world I wouldn't have messed about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers
I sure hope Yahoo doesn't patent it, so we can see things like this in other search engines as well...
I like the idea, but I'd love to be able to turn on and off search results that contain blogs or public messageboard content. Sometimes that's what I want to find, and sometimes it's completely useless and annoying.
slashdot would already have 800 comments hailing google as the most intelligent company in the world who is the only one with good ideas..
This is GREAT.. yahoo have great innovation still.. like others have said i can filter through the crap much easier now..
Wonder if yahoo has patented this technique or what?
Search for "Penis enlargement pills" and try to find only sites with information.
A friend of mine... once looked for this information to find out what was actually in these things and to see what legitimate data was available. In short- any nuggets of useful information (if indeed there are any) are totally buried in the avalanche of crap vendors.
Posting anonymously just because I can.
Google doesn't fully index all sites aswell.
Yahoo, new hotness ...again.
Something like this is an overdue feature for all search engines.
...etc.
Perhaps a W3C list of standard site types as well.
For example: "diary", "reference", "archive"
A person doing research on the string "speed boat"
might not be interested in someone's blog site where the word is mentioned.
There are many more interesting distinctions than a simple dichotomy between commercial/noncommercial--why not list them directly?
Have a look at Clusty as one example of a search engine that categorizes your search results along more dimensions, yet seems at least as intuitive and usable as the new Yahoo! interface.
Yahoo!'s interface seems unnecessarily simplistic to me.
The projector is rendered using a photoshop plugin on the front page of the Yahoo! Movies.
/spoiler
I only say this as some people have an aversion to that 35mm lense flare and can actually spasm and go into arrest when they see it.
Seriously, I don't need a site like this, I just go and see ANY movie that my girlfriend says "I don't want to see that one, how about this one" where the 'this one' is DIRE SHIT, and the one she doesn't want to see has been directed by covering a camera in chocolate, and throwing it into a pit of lesbians, involves car chases, explosions, sex, as well as sex, in a car, while it is exploding!!1
girlfriend Audio pronunciation of "girlfriend" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (gûrlfrnd)
n.
1. A favored female companion or sweetheart.
2. A female friend.
w'side
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I know the point of a beta is to get, essentially, free buzz and free testers, but this implies that the product eventually move out of beta. (Google News, GMail, I'm looking in your general direction.)
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Slider in the middle: #1 result is apple.com/ipod
- makes sense, being the manufacturer's site, and all.
Move it out of the middle at all and it drops in rank - move it all the way to research, and it's not even on the first page, while the #1 result is "ipodsoft.com, offering a collection of ipod software". Move it to shopping, and again it's not on the first page. Apparently the manufacturer's site is neither shopping nor research, but something else... Still #1 for middle of the road, though.
(And yes, I know it's a beta.)
Google has had this site http://labs.google.com/personalized for quite some time. It's more broad than Sales Vs. Non-Sales but is essentially the same thing, no?
I thought Yahoo pledged that they would creat no more products or services until all there current ones were 100% firefox compatible? Launch.yahoo.com still doesn't work with firefox. Now I question their integrity.m patibility/2100-1032_3-5623838.html/
http://news.com.com/Yahoo+pledges+full+Firefox+co
You can limit search results by specifying daterange:startdate-enddate, where startdate and enddate are Julian dates.
I think yahoo uses a point system when determining if a site is a shoping site or an infromation site. Much like spam assasin. So people will find a sweet spot for what they want to find.
And as far as why shopping vs research, ever dry looking up specs on hardware on google, only to find 80% of the first few pages stores? (or reviews of the product on the store)
I think this is a great feature, and might actually get me to use yahoo search because of that feature alone.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Slider doesn't make much of a difference.
Just tried searching for Mig 29 and sliding it over to "shopping", I didn't get anything, yahoo sucks!
didn't implement it too well. With the scale all the way towards "research" the top result was a link to store.yahoo.com!
try doing a search on "robot toy."
TTFA (Try the fine [web] app)?
I like.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Most likely.
Plus, with Yahoo!/Overture's cost model, it's not just positioning that factors into the cost model, but traffic. If you have ads that get clicked-through often -- which is probably more the case with people looking for heavily commercial content and in the mood for market research -- you'll need to pay more to keep your spot, at least if other advertisers are competing with you.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
What I want is something that filters out those f-ing lame "directories" that provide virtually no useful information at all, but seem to often end up at the top of the lists...
Google won by having a simple interface, growing at the right pace (technological backend), and a search engine completely different than what the search engine optimizing people were used to. They were used to meta-tag optimizing, which worked on all of the big portals in the late 90's. Google tried a simple method of checking how many links a site had. That's all they did, and got investors, even a Yahoo! owner.
In 2005, the search engine optimization business must be at its peak. Not only that, but they all focus on Google--not on a variety of sites like they had to before (Yahoo!, AltaVista, etc.) This causes a lot of garbage to appear in search results. It doesn't happen on purpose, people work hard to insert garbage into Google (like they did into Yahoo! and AV.)
What Yahoo! and AV has to do is invent a NEW algorithm that works that is completely different than how Google does it (Instead of trying to match what Google is doing.) Doing the opposite is how Google beat Yahoo search. See, now that all optimization techniques are targeted at Google's algorithms and tendencies, any big search engine that comes up with a different algorithm with good results, will be able to sustain those good results for at least a year. That's because SEO people will focus on Google since that's where all the knowledge and investment in gaining that knowledge has been. Until a year later, when a press release comes out that Z search has 60% marketshare and Google 20%, people will not even realize how big Z is.
That is how simple it is. Search is not about finding a good way to categorize web sites and retrieve them to a query. Search is about battling search engine optimizers that will come out when you are big and popular.
People would not mind imprecise results or viewing the second page of results, if all of them were relevant, non-garbage pages. But, once a popular site turns to crap, and people hear of an alternative, they will dump Google at an instant. Yet, as Google will lose visitors, the numbers of people targetting them with SEO (search engine optimization) will increase, since nobody will realize Google is losing visitors for a long time after Google starts losing visitors. This will cause a non-ending spiral of Google getting more crap in the next year, and less current users using it.
In 1 year, a search engine could have the majority of the users using it, while the SEO people could continue to optimize for Google.
When they realize another search engine is being used more, people will drop their AdWords accounts instantly. The reason being is that AdWords, according to studies, are driven by SEO experts, and not business people. It turns out that business people do not have the experience in creating good AdWords ads and keywords, and 60% or something have failed many times to get any results, and have given up. Therefore, the AdWords market is driven by Search Engine Marketers, and once they realize another search engine has more market share, they will switch to it, and their clients will follow, drying up AdWords income for Google as well.
The only realistic product Google has is the stuff they sell to companies, which I don't think they are even being challenged in by Yahoo! and MSN.
I think the value of Google is their business of selling search hardware to companies, since that is what they have made money doing in the beginning, and since it probably works very well because the valid results don't have to compete with garbage results.
In conclusion, creating spin offs or clones of Google that use the same technology will be affected by all the tips and tricks that SEO users use against Google. On the other hand, creating a search engine that works on completely different principles could mean that good search results would be sustainable for at least a year, not affected by tricks against Google that happen to affect this search engine, before the SEM's figure anything out.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
I suggested that Google do this over a year ago, many of my search results are still plagued with sales and training courses though :(
--Murray Barton
I was making fun of the syntax of the parent statement.
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Like everyone else, I switched to Google when it was clearly the best search engine. But Yahoo! is showing promising improvements these days that I switched back a while ago.
I have always used Safari's tab to open the Google results in new tabs then view them one by one. However since recent versions of Safari, opening Google links in new tab no longer work! This is a show-stopper for me.
Then I tried Yahoo!. Not surprisingly I can open the results in new tabs again. Also Yahoo!'s results are now actually better than Google's most of the time.
All these plus the new, cleaner Yahoo! Search web site and Yahoo! services integration, I switched back to Yahoo! and http://search.yahoo.com/ is now my home page.