Reaction: TileBars: visualization of term distribution information in full text information access

This article talks about tilebars, which are actually a visualization that I'd never seen. After reading through the paper, it looks like something that could be fairly useful for some quick late night research. Tilebars allow for a quick overview of relevancy for a document for a given document search, and also allows you to tell where inside that document might be the most relevant area. Skipping directly to the most useful area of a document could help a user decide whether the whole document is worth perusing for their current use. Outside of the visualization, it sounds like the author try to tackle indexing methods for allowing a quick creation of this visualization. It sounds like they're trying to avoid natural language processing though, and they do not do any cross-referencing of documents to see how many times that document has been cited, or our famous the authors are or anything.

Still, I can't help but wonder why I do not see this anywhere, and I wonder if it has to do with indexing.