It’s called Yahoo! Mindset. The basic idea is to let users decide if they are more interested in research or in shopping for something. Pretty neat concept and interesting implementation.

I did a search for television using Mindset. Once you’ve done your initial search, a bar appears allowing you to choose which way you want the results to go.

The initial results start out with the TV Guide website and the Emmys. Switch it over to research and the top sites are Wikipedia’s section on Television, the band from the 1970s and the NASA TV landing page.

Slide over to shopping and I get Lifetime Television’s website and the Fox Broadcasting website. Not exactly what I would expect for shopping.

The ads on top and down the right side don’t change, which is what I would expect - pretty hard to get companies to pay for ads for people who are declaring their interest is strictly research, not to mention it’s only Beta, so much too soon to ask advertisers to prefer one or the other.

It should be interesting to see how this one goes. It’s a great idea, since people who want to research don’t necessarily want online stores.