Archived post by Kristen Nicole.
Microsoft Labs has revealed a new product called Pivot, which operates as a discovery tool taking advantage of several systems and methods of typical data collection. With Pivot, search is modified on a conceptual level, looking to provide a visual and fluid form of interaction for the actual search experience.
Currently in private beta, Microsoft Pivot pulls from several of the company’s tools and services in order to create this fluid experience. Combining Windows 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Microsoft Silverlight, the finished product is a gleaming discovery tool that focuses on multimedia and intuitive interactions for its end users.
You can incorporate your browsing activity with search, and combine these with recommendations. What Pivot looks to be doing is finding ways to integrate each aspect of the web experience into the other, minimizing any differentiation amongst the three. The end result? A unified experience that acts as a centralizing intersection amongst the varied ways in which we use our personal computers.
What this really means is that Microsoft will be looking to its separate entities to track a good portion of your behavior, utilizing the data to create better recommendations towards its search engine. Your search results are organized into Collections, which group together similar items across the web. From here, Microsoft is taking a different approach to organizing the Internet itself.