giving noncommercial web sites a boost in search rankings

Over at Yahoo's research center, they've got a pretty cool tool they're working on called Mindset: a little slider so that you can determine whether you want a web search to bring up less commerical websites. The program, still in development, using machine learning to analyze web pages' language to tell if they're trying to sell you something. Read more about it here.

If you want some information on a product, say, and want to filter out a bunch of sites trying to simply sell it to you, I you could slide the button over to the "noncommerical" side. Or, if you're having trouble finding a site to buy something as opposed to people blogging about it, you could slide the button toward commercial.

Try out Mindset.

I wonder what other kinds of sliders would be useful, and what else machine learning programs could learn to filter for?