One of the best search ideas I'd seen in a long time was a visual search engine called
kartoo.(link goes to wikipedia). The basic idea was that your search terms were visually linked to related search terms to help you navigate to the right results based on context. Kartoo was a meta search engine, meaning that they didn't have their own indicies, but would leverage other search operator APIs. I was really happy to see them around because in 2001 when the semantic web was young, kartoo was a view into the future of browsing the web, but alas they seem to have bitten the dust. The shot above is of their post 2004 interface, but I think I liked their original graph style node and arc interface the best. Not sure when they died, but RIP kartoo
