Over the last two years, a series of new companies have begun to address pieces of the meta-information problem. Google is an excellent example of a company that does a good job of searching, weighting the relative importance of web sites using a technique known as eigenvector analysis. On the Google web site, your results always come back the way Google decided to present them, as a web page with a list of hits. The hyperbolic tree is an algorithm for visualizing data. One of the best examples of the hyperbolic tree came out of Xerox PARC and is now commercialized by a Xerox spin-off, Inxight.
Hyperbolic trees are a way of visualizing large, complex datasets.
But, you can't visualize your Google results with a hyperbolic tree. You have to take your Google the way they serve it. No special orders. Hyperbolic trees are a perfect example of why we need flexibility in visualizing data. The hyperbolic tree algorithm is great for certain kinds of data, but any one way of seeing gets old quickly, particularly if the paradigm is not appropriate to the data.