Was playing around with some searches using the new Yahoo Mindset beta which allows users to:

View Yahoo! Search results sorted according to whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources).

First I moved the slider all the way over to the left for maximum ’shopping’ threshold and tried the search result for my own name. This is usually my very first test search on any search engine. Not because I’m some egomaniac, but because I understand what should be relevant results for my name more than any other search term:

All those results seem to be from example scripts people used to run off my php scripts diary site. The first example script I shared was from 1999. Better shopping related results for my name would actually be commercial programs that I sell, so maximum threshold here — if I’m understanding the usage — was failing to properly categorize my search desires.

Next I figured I’d try maximum ‘research’ on the slider. Again, no wait for page loading, it loads dynamically on the screen (using AJAX, I presume).

The top result here is an RSS feed, not even a web page. The second Stuart Henshall’s blog commenting on the first broadcast I did with one of the Skype team back in 2003. I was running a webcam to capture the studio experience. The third last result points to comments made in Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.

To be fair about truly evaluating the potential value of this type of search engine I’d want to run many, many more search tests. I did conduct a search for “TDavid scripts” and moved to maximum slider on shopping. Still wasn’t showing any relevant commercial program pages. In fact, the top result was a search results page for another search engine.

Hmm.

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