Entity Cube from Microsoft Asia is an extremely interesting experiment that works with entities and a faceted view.
From the site: "EntityCube is a research prototype for exploring object-level search technologies, which automatically summarizes the Web for entities (such as people, locations and organizations) with a modest web presence."
" EntityCube is just a prototype service for collating and summarizing the specific entity information appearing in the Internet web content. Its technology is built to help users to perform Web data mining for text contents around the names and get the search results based on the search of available web contents. "
It's very good on names of people who are very present on the web. See this profile on Stephen Abram. or Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party. Will show related names, and academic references (though this part on most searches seems completely unrelated.)
See Entity Cube, Experiencing Information (Dec 19, 2009) for further comments.
Posted by Gwen at February 17, 2010 10:27 PM