Clicking around Yahoo! Research I came across Mindset, which has been around for a while but caught my eye when I was searching for intention-based search.

Mindset is an early demonstration of our ongoing machine learning research applied to the problem of web search. We trained an automated text classifier which determines whether any given web page is mostly “commercial” (e.g. it’s main purpose is to sell you something) or not. We used new advanced algorithms recently developed at Yahoo! Research to train a classifier which is accurate and yet still fast enough to classify web pages on the fly as they show up in search results.

The demo provides a slider widget for users to explicitly specify their intent. Leaving the slider in the middle means they want to use the original Yahoo! search result order. Moving the slider to the extreme right means they want the top results to be those which the classifier is most confident are “non-commercial”.

Putting the slider in between those two positions means a blend — somewhat faithful to the original ordering but also tending to bring the more obvious non-commercial pages to the top. Similarly, sliding into the left half indicates blending of commercialness confidence vs original ordering. Regardless of the exact user interface mechanism (which was not the focus of our work), Mindset demonstrates how machine learning can enable explicit user intent to be harnessed to improve the search experience.

This goes back to something Doc Searls said a few weeks ago at Identity Mashup. Doc doesn’t pay much heed to the fact that people need to be aware of something before they get to purchasing mode. His attention marketing example is often that he wants to purchase a specific lens for his camera whereas I’m more interested in concepts and exploration of general product categories.

The simple slider control mechanism in Mindset makes it easy to express your intent. Either you are researching or ready to buy.

Moving the slider towards “researching” returns results which could be added into your attention stream. Passing the external and current attention data between research and shopping would simplify purchase process and make Mindset even more useful.

Once you have done your research, moving the slider over to “shopping” signifies your intention to make a purchase and the tool could be primed with your previous attention data, showing you the best prices for the products and services you’ve researched and are considering. Right now you’re greeting with a familiar search engine list of links, I’d like to see an interim page with a current snapshot of my information which I could then tweak before moving on to the actual purchasing process. All of this information would be fed back into my attention datastore as well.
I need to spend a lot more time with Mindset. The results could certainly use some work, but if the feedback loop is tight and external data can be pulled in, Mindset could evolve into a useful tool.

Reading Material

Doc Searls talking about Attention vs. Intention and User-centric = Independent.

“The Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or ‘capturing’) buyers.” – Doc.

David Berlind and Doc, “Are your marketing dollars wasted on attention instead of intention?”

a. Conversations
b. Transactions
c. Relationships

John Batelle’s Database of Intentions.

Alex Barnett’s 20 Thoughts on Attention.

http://motherpie.typepad.com/motherpie/2006/07/attention.html

Jellyfish thinks search intermediaries like Google are keeping to much of the value for themselves and wants to be the tipping point which aligns buyer, seller and intermediary.

Technology

Recording your Attention

Niall Kennedy on Attention.xml in NetNewsWire.

Realize people don’t want to be tracked so closely and instead think about building clickstream sanitizers to increase adoption recorders and the nascent ROOT Markets datastore.

IE 7 needs an attention plug-in.

Go to AD Tech in Chicago in a few weeks to get a sense of how marketers perceive Attention/Intention. They have been dying for this for years, albeit using different language to describe similar goals. Don’t mention operating systems.

Attention economy is going to reduce spam, alter pricing and change the way people interact with advertising/products/brands. That’s my take on the pitch.

Phrases like “Data portability guarantees choice and pricing pressure” sound great, but such is not the case. That’s an assumption at the highest level. We hope that will happen.

“Establish microcommunities with provable buying power” are group buys. We’ve been doing this on the internet via forums for a decade now. Time to make it mainstream, beginning of mass customization.

“Attention the meta layer above information routing”- it’s not *the* meta layer, attention is a new channel between people and marketers.