Yahoo Research Labs on Friday released a demo of Yahoo Mindset (via Search Engine Lowdown), offering searchers the choice of viewing Yahoo Search results sorted based on a searcher's intent: "Sometimes you want to buy stuff and sometimes you just want to do [non-commercial] research," according to the Yahoo Search Blog. Mindset sorts search results according to a commercial-informational continuum. The search results that are offered up are based on a setting that a searcher selects.

An intuitive slider in the interface is used to set the search predisposition for commercial versus non-commercial (academic, non-commercial, research-oriented sources). If a web page hasn't been classified yet, Mindset attempts to classify the page in the background to classify it the next time the same query is made.

Yahoo is using machine learning for the text classification, assigning each page a relatively continuous score ranging from -2 (most commercial) to +2 (most informational). Pages scored 0 reflect a balanced combination of commercial and informational. Machine learning refers to computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience, replicating a human activity.