I stumbled across this "Tianamo" visual search engine, which is currently in its beta, and thought I'd share. Notice how it displays features of a database and yet still uses navigable space. It also ties nicely with Sorapure's InfoVis discussion: I'm not sure how you could incorporate this into an assignment, but it definitely would get students thinking about the shortcomings of a google search.
According to the Youtube video, the distance between the peaks shows how closely each sub term is related. This visualization is doing a lot more work than a simple list of hyper-links, even with the understanding that the first on the list are the most common (the highest peaks in Tianamo). Very cool.
P.S. I also tried one where I added "Tom Peele" to the search terms, but I decided that was just a little too creepy (I thought of the "Social Networking in the Writing Classroom" reading for today).
P.P.S The video is really slow because I didn't edit it at all. Feel free to skip around.
Awesome! I'm glad that I actually stuck with paging back through posts I missed before...
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