Yahoo has released a beta version of its Mindset Internet search tool in an attempt to steal a march on Google and regain market share by reducing the user curse of spam hits.
Mindset appears as a slider icon above Yahoo search results and enables surfers to prioritise findings based on whether they originate from commercial or information-based sources such as academia or research.
The default setting presents results as a mixture of both, but if the slider is moved to the right, information-based sources will be listed first, while positioning it to the left will shift the focus to e-commerce Web sites.
The offering is based on artificial intelligence software, and while Yahoo refused to provide a specific release date, Michael Azoff, a senior research analyst at Butler Group, said he expected it to be available very soon as such technology was relatively mature in a general sense.
But Azoff also believes that Mindshare has the potential to shake Google’s lead in the search engine market.
"Google originally stole a march simply because of the big gap between what it and the others offered. But there’s a lot of competition between Google, Yahoo and MSN these days, and the differences between them is getting smaller," he explained.
As a result, the technology has "interesting potential" and may well encourage people to at least try Yahoo if they’re no longer satisfied with Google.
The problem for Google, Azoff explained, is that it has become a target of spammers due to its leading position in the sector. "There’s a lot of understanding out there about how Google rates different Web sites so companies have learned to cheat and feed it false information by knowing what its spiders look for," he said.
This means that users can end up with tens if not hundreds of hits from the same Web site, which clogs up their search. While this situation may boost Mindshare’s appeal, Yahoo must still ensure that the "perception" of its new tool was positive and find a way of overcoming customer inertia, said Azoff.
