Slider Searches, Yahoo Style

I can hear Gary Price cheering from here -- he loves sliders for searches and now Yahoo's given him a new one to play with. Their Mindset search allows you to use a slider to specify whether you're doing research or shopping. You can try this beta at http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/ .

I did a search for iPod. I got a normal-looking result page with a slider at the top. The normal page had a mix of commercial and non-commercial results, from the official iPod page to a Wiki tracking a project to port Linux to the iPod.

The slider allows you to move left for more shopping-type results, and right for more research-type results. I could not get this to work in Firefox. I had to use IE. (The slider DOES work in Opera, but the page doesn't render properly and it's impossible to read.)

(Update: It works for me now in Firefox. I don't know why it didn't work before. Hmm.)

I moved the slider (just click and drag) all the way to the left and the page refreshed with pointers to Amazon and other shopping sites. Strangely Apple's sites vanished from the first page of results. There was only one result I'd consider iffy (one of those "free iPods" sites, which I'm not sure is really about shopping.) There was a result for Amazon Japan; perhaps we can add a geographic slider in here too?

I then moved the slider all the way to the right. I got a couple of editorial sites, a bunch of blogs, a Technorati tag page, and some other useful more editorial stuff. The first result, however, was for a site that's selling iPod software. Very useful iPod software it looks like, but --

You can break the search. If you slide the slider all the way to "research" and then search for something really commercial like "buy one get one free" you will get commercial oriented results on the first page (though the first few results aren't.) If you move the slider all the way to shopping and search for something like hydrocephalic shunt, the results will not change much at all.

So the best use for this search is for things that have strong representation in both shopping and research pages -- pretty much any brand name, most nouns, etc. Fun to play with. I wish I could get it to work in Firefox.

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