wiki visual

Apeksha and I were talking the other day about user interface, and (thoroughly indirectly) came up with the idea that a google search should include - in part at least - a visual breakdown of the general areas that are associated with the term you're searching, so that you can know at once how to get a decent overview of the topic.

The problem with this shares a common root with the problem of natural language processing and with artificial intelligence (at least on cursory examination), which basically means that to implement it we have to have humans construct the list of categories by hand for every search. Thankfully this has already been done to a large extent by wikipedia!

Not two hours later, I read in Fast Company that some people have already been working on visualizing wikipedia... but after a quick google search it looks like they're all concerned with visualizing the whole thing. Here's a collection that is (again after cursory search - let me know if you find different) representative:
http://www.scimaps.org/maps/wikipedia/

Understanding the structure of human knowledge in general is great, and some of these people have made it visually compelling too, but it looks like nobody has put this idea into a particular context, so here's a quick sketch of the idea:




So while I was making that sketc, I was thinking, 'surely this quick sketch wouldn't blow their minds over at google - there has to be somebody there who's thought of this and prototyped it a little more thoroughly than me...' And yep, sure enough they have. Go to 'show options' on the results page, and then click 'wonder wheel' towards the bottom of the list, and you'll see something like this:




It looks to be basically what we were thinking of, requires a little more research to determine if basing it on wikipedia would be more useful, robust, etc.