Intent driven search from Yahoo!
I recently came across this nice research piece from Yahoo!
Yahoo! Mindset is an intent driven search allowing you to bias your search results towards either shopping or research using a neat "Web 2.0" looking slider bar at the top of the page (if you leave the slider in its default position, you just get standard Yahoo! SERPS). Do a search for Apple iPod and slide it towards the shopping end and sure enough you get loads of e-commerce sites offering iPods and iPod accessories, slide it toward the research end and you get lots of news articles and techie/advocate sites.
The tool uses text classification technologies to score each result from -2 (shopping) to +2(research), the extent to which you slide then impacts the order in which the results are returned. The research team behind it created a seed set of data by manually scoring pages and then use machine learning to extend the scoring principles out to the rest of the Yahoo! index.
This is obviously still a) beta and b) research, but it gives a good idea of how intent driven search could start to infiltrate mainstream search engine results. We may even see this kind of thing used behind the scenes when you add qualifying keywords to your search, in other words, adding "prices" to your search terms will produce more shopping related results, OK this happens to a certain extent naturally but it could be used to amplify the quality of the results you receive.
More information on Yahoo Mindset and how it all works can be found here
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