[probinso]

I would build a discovery system. Search systems imply that you know what you're looking for, it also implies a short query.

Imagine instead you start writing out your ideas in natural form. Documents will appear that are relevant to your ideas, but with the goal of diversifying category. Instead of the top 100 results, you may just get minimal results per category.

As you continue to write the relevant documents get more constraint, but continue to attempt to maximize diversity.

I don't know if this work for everything, but would be interesting.