As of January, 2012, this site is no longer being updated, due to work and health issues
When people say "visualization", they mean two things. One is simply to use graphical elements carefully in displaying results of searches. The other is attempting to display the search results graphically, in two or three dimensions, grouped by topic or category. Both approaches are meant to take advantage of the human capacity to process visual information quickly and efficiently. Good visualization should integrate the natural and technical world, use natural intuition, spatial cues and perception.
Most experiments with visualization as graphic display of search results have not succeeded, perhaps because they are attempting to combine graphical displays with text concepts, perhaps because most people are searching for individual items rather than a topic or category. However, some people are so visually-oriented that they pour their time and effort into developing these systems. Although visualization search products have not succeeded, the fervor of the researchers and developers indicates that for those people, and for the rest of us in some circumstances, visualization is compelling and valuable.
Searching on the Right Side of the Brain SearchDay; June 18, 2001 by Chris Sherman
Contrasts two public visual search sites, Map.net and WebBrain.com. Map.net provides conceptual relationships with graphic elements, such as category box size, and the color and size of site circles. WebBrain shows an association map, highlighting the relationships between categories and subcategorizes.The Information Doors Workshop on Hypertext and Information Retrieval at the ACM HyperText 2000 Conference
Resources
Open Directory Information Visualization Listings
Products and sites about visualization for various kinds of information and data sets.