Thursday, March 4, 2010

Pivot your way to a new type of search

Sometimes the web can be a distracting and confusing element in our lives, where everything is taken over by data over the spread of page after page. Pivot, a newly-engineered program gives a user the ability to zoom in and out of web databases- spreading from topic to topic, with everything being connected and related.

The data we consume is greater than the sum of the parts. By filtering certain areas of the web, you can break down the data and information piece by piece. For example, looking at a mortality chart, you can filter down the types of death, which one is more predominant, going through which ever age you want. You can filter by age, sex, gender, types of death, by year, etc just by the click of a button and you are 'swimming in an info graphic.'

But if it is possible to do it for data (info graphic, etc), then why can't you do it for raw data (web searches, web sites, magazines, etc.). Well you can. Pivot lets you search a url for any website and zoom in and out of it and breaking it down to its different components of information, organized all to what you want to know. Example: You type in Sports Illustrated magazine. You can filter and zoom in/out of every magazine ever produced by Sports Illustrated.You can go into decades, years, specific issues, people featured. If you find a Sports Illustrated that Lance Armstrong was featured in, you can find all the magazine (Sports Illustrated) that Lance Armstrong was featured in and then you can see all the bicyclists that were ever featured in Sports Illustrated. Because of this, you can look at everything on the web, instead of page by page, but by filters, extracting information and teasing out knowledge.


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