Zoe What?

By Aaron Goldman

In our ongoing quest to spec out the perfect search engine, Bryan Simkins, our FedEx client, pointed me to this coverage of Zoetrope.

Apparently, Zoetrope is a joint initiative between Adobe and the University of Washington. Per Read Write Web, “What they're building is a tool that allows for manipulating the web over time. Instead of the snapshot of the web you see today when googling, Zoetrope will let anyone use keyword searches to discover archived web information and look for patterns in the data found.”

This is truly a horse of a different color. More akin to Google Chrome than Google Web Search. It’s essentially a shortcut platform that allows you to consolidate the disparate sting of searches that you used to perform when completing a task into one master “query.”

This demo shows some of the applications of Zoetrope…



Imagine the possibilities for branded widgets in this environment. FedEx could show historical package tracking -- view all the pkgs. you’ve ever shipped with a competitor and overlay FedEx’s pricing to show what you could have saved (or how much faster you could’ve gotten them there).

Or the Weight Watchers calorie counter that scrapes all the menus you’ve browsed the past week and gives you your point total.

The sky, er… cloud is truly the limit there!