Google Labs has been developing some interesting ways of viewing your search results including a Timeline View and Map View. I played around with both views. For the Timeline View, I did a search for Alfred Hitchcock.
Obviously this view benefits from searches that have some clearly defined chronology such as people and events. In fact, some terms (such as ‘dog’) are too general to return any timeline results. Clicking on a section of the timeline (e.g. 1950s) produces a finer grained timeline.
I searched for ‘Plone conference’ using the Map View.
The result was predictable but informative. This time a search for ‘dog’ did return a map, but the result was less than useful, again illustrating that these types of alternative search results are most valuable when the user has some pre-existing knowledge of the subject and possibly some expectations of the results.