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.
Even though I have not been able to try Pivot first hand, the concept behind it really seems to strive for a more humanistic approach to utilizing the web. By humanistic I mean that the way in which our brains process information is not so cataloged that we need to differentiate search from a web browser. Instead of letting this relationship between an access point to the web and a filter for the web’s content fall to the wayside, Microsoft Pivot is hoping that in can relate the two in a manner that proves beneficial to you and its other consumers in the long run.
I’ve long said that beating Google at the search game would require an ability to restructure the very schema surrounding web search, becoming so natural that it acts as an extension of our human thought process and behavior. It appears that Pivot is looking to move in this direction, taking advantage of the multiple tools it already has for some of its products.
By doing so, Microsoft is also looking to provide additional value for each of the products that will contribute to the new Pivot effort. Similar to the way in which Google Chrome acts as a browser yet becomes so much more when you link it with your Google account, Microsoft is instilling irreplacable pieces to a larger puzzle within its own applications. It’s a smart approach, utilizing the tools it already has at hand to create something entirely new and potentially beneficial for a wide range of consumers.
As Google has already initiated a similar tactic with some of its own applications, it will be interesting to see who is able to come out on top. For search results, Google is still tweaking its own products in order to maintain its leadership position. Taking on several projects for testing new features, applications, products and services, Google could also be on its way to collect enough consumer data to provide improved recommendations within a seamless search tool.
