Visually Displaying Search Results

Question

I have an app where the user can enter free form text and I do a natural language search. The results that come back contains the search results and also evidence from where the results were from. I looking for thoughts, advice and inspiration of how these results can be presented in a visual manner rather than a traditional text block + evidence link manner.

My target user base is a normal / mere mortal web user. Someone who can do keyword based search using Google or other search engines. The content that gets returned is again text only. Having said so, what I want is the ability to present the results in a visual manner through click/zoom-able graphs.

Answer 1

I've used hyperbolic tree like visualations in exactly the same usage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_tree Was great at showing 2nd and 3rd level connections clearly, but isnt super space efficient if you have lots of data to display or you are using handheld devices.

For general inspiration, start with http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html# for a quick reference to lots of examples