What's your mindset?

While on the subject of search engines, I thought I'd take a moment (for those of you who may not be aware of it) and talk about the Yahoo! Mindset search engine. Yahoo! calls it the "Intent-Driven Search Engine." The slant, if you will, is this engine allows you to sort search results for your query based on whether you're shopping or just researching. The idea being that if you're out there researching a topic, you would probably appreciate not being bogged down or distracted by ecom sites. Yahoo! Mindset is still in beta, but now is your chance to "play" with it and even shape its future because Yahoo! is encouraging participation and asking for your feedback hoping to levarage the power of the collective mindset.

Better Searching?

As part of my day to day I like to test out various search engines to keep abreast of what's out there and I must say I particulary like some of the functionality of the SearchMash.com search engine--its no surprise its good this is actually a Google product used to test new innovations.



What I like about the engine is how it brings back results not only from web pages, but from Blogs, images, videos and Wikipedia and organizes them into buckets according to these categories. It also includes a feedback function where users can let them know if the results (by category) were useful--a nice meld of user participation with technical intelligence. Google should fast-track intergation of some of this site's features, like the catgorized results, into into the mothership site, they really make navigating the results much easier. Check it out, if you have not done so already.

Corporate sites benefit from user communities.

I've written and produced a few pieces about how companies in the B2B space can benefit from Web 2.0 principles and technologies. Take a look at some of the points made in this recent AdAge Post. I particularly liked this point:
"Visitors to [corporate and brand] websites have a much higher propensity to recommend products," said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, whose research shows more than 40% of people who give a brand e-mail feedback are likely to recommend it to others."

Companies can benefit from the creation of their own user community.