Facets have become standard in modern enterprise search solutions. Their main use can be seen in filtering search results by considering the peculiarity of values of important hit attributes.

Inter:gator uses facets extensively:

1. One of the most important feature of inter:gator facets is, that it is not necessary to prepare them before indexing starts. Facets can be defined at every moment and are available without reindexing while business goes on.
2. In many cases the user will not find documents, but the specification of particular meta data is the answer on a query. Therefore facets are presented as results and not real search results.

Facets can be generated, f.e. for visualizing most frequent keywords, from the total pool of information, that means from all documents. The base of such display is a hidden search („*“) for all documents.

Furthermore it is possible to visualize the hierarchy of information by graphic means, shown in the following example as hyperbolical tree.