There’s a new search tool that provides an eye-opening means to display relational, contextual and graphical search results. The search engine is called Silobreaker, and it promotes itself as 360 degree search for news and current events with the tagline, “Insight as service.”
This site draws content on global issues, science, technology, and business from approximately 10,000 news, blog, research, and multimedia sources. But the tool is a bit more than just a news aggregator, as it looks to provide relevance to the information it displays by mapping the relationships between different stories, putting them in context with one another.
A search on any topic can be viewed as context extraction (how it relates to other elements), geographical mapping (with a map displaying the origin of the most popular items that fit the search term), trend tracking (a graph that measures the number of mentions of the term), and relational mapping.
Relational mapping is a really neat way to view the data, and the image above shows this capability with the search on the term GIS. The fun part of this display mode is the clicking and manipulation of the nodes to see how topics relate to each other.
