Live Labs recently launched  Pivot, a new tool to visually explore large sets of data. Gray Flake presented it at the latest TED Talk event.

presents data in the form of a collection of images accompanied by textual data.

The user can explore collections by zooming and panning, or by applying pivot operations on a selected item. The pivot operation applies a sort of faceted search that re-shape the current exploration axis.

The paradigm look really interesting, and the implementation is extremely fast  and, as the developers claim, able to scale up to huge collection size.

Read more here http://www.getpivot.com/