Pivot is an experiment from Microsoft Live Labs that promises to make it “easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun”. Pivot allows you to view and interact with massive amounts of data on the Web, spread across many web sites, and zoom in and out to different levels of detail.
The basis of Pivot is “collections” of information from numerous web sites. Each collection can be used to view relationships and patterns between and across the pages in the collection. For example, here’s a collection of world leaders (presidents and prime ministers) grouped by age:
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We could re-arrange to group (or filter) by country, continent, gender, role, and many others, with one or 2 clicks. We can filter further by specific age group, as shown here:
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And at any stage we can click on one specific element (in this case, one leader) to get a search page of web resources for that leader (using Bing, of course – this is Microsoft Labs, not Google).
For a more detailed demonstration of this technology, watch this video.
You can also download it and use for real - there is no charge as it’s an “experiment”.
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