The Yahoo! Search blog reports on a new tool that attempts to get inside the mind of the searcher, offering results that are specifically tailored to the type of search you’re trying to conduct:

Sometimes you want to buy stuff and sometimes you just want to do research. In a typical search page, results point to commercial pages that are mixed together with non-commercial pages, so it’s harder to find the type of information you’re looking for. Mindset is our attempt to help solve that problem.

Through the use of machine learning for text classification, we try to classify each web page in the top 100 search results for a query. Then we sort those results according to the preference you set. Mindset uses an intuitive slider in the interface, so you can set the bias for commercial vs. non-commercial results. Often, we come across a web page that hasn’t been classified yet. In those cases, Mindset tries to classify that web page in the background, so it’ll be classified along with the rest of the results next time you do the same query.”

There’s reportedly a running joke at Google to the effect that what they’d really like is a direct tap into people’s brains, and it looks like this Yahoo! project offers one small step in that direction. Can full behavioral profiling as a basis for tailoring search results be very far behind?