OK, enough about Google and the beta products on its Google Labs page.
Yahoo has an uncannily similar skunkworks outpost called Yahoo Next--imitation is the sincerest form of search-engine competition--and it, too, is fun to rummage around in.
At the moment, Yahoo Next is playing host to everything from a beta of a new version of Yahoo Messenger to a travel search engine called Yahoo Travel FareChase.
Mindset is a search engine of two minds--it's designed to be used for both shopping searches and less commerce-oriented research.
Shove the slider all the way to "researching," and you're likely to find pages from the Wikipedia near the top of your results; move it over to "shopping," and the first few sites may be places that sell whatever it was you were searching for.
We are a site for folks who buy technology stuff; we're not, however, an online store.
But Mindset's most obvious weakness in my trial run was this: The sites that show up near the top may fit the bill as either "shopping" or "research" as appropriate, but they often didn't seem to be the most logical, big-name contenders.
For instance, when I searched for "Dell Computer" with the slider set to "shopping," I kind of expected to get the site of...well, Dell Computer.
Instead, a pricing page (at Yahoo itself) for Dell-compatible RAM was up top.
Link #2 was to Dell's tech support site (which sounds more like "researching" to me), and link #3 was the first one that pointed to Dell's e-commerce area.
But hey, Mindset is accompanied by a page with lots of disclaimers that it's merely an experimental demo, along with other interesting information about the technology behind the service.