Smarter Searching from Yahoo?

Yahoo has had a new search feature in beta for nearly one year. Yahoo Mindset is an "intent-driven" search that allows you to influence the order of the top 100 search results by telling Yahoo if you are shopping or researching. Check out the Yahoo Mindset demo here.

A sliding scale -2 (most commercial) to +2 (most informational) is offered to the searcher to determine the order of the results. A 0 represents a balance of informational and commercial.

Two quick thoughts:

1. While content has always been important for search engine rankings, it will be increasingly important to have a mixture of both informational and commercial content on your site. Informational content pages to draw potential/future customers to your site so you'll be in their considered set when they're ready to buy and commercial pages to sell your products or services for those searchers who already have their credit cards out.
2. As Google, Yahoo, and MSN continue to develop new features to help them provide the most relevant results for searchers, it will become even more difficult to have your web pages consistently appear in the top results for all searchers. Google, for instance, has already instituted a "learning" feature that will track your search engine results clicks (if you want it to) so that Google learns your search habits and then "serves" the most relevant results based on your past search habits.