Abstract. Search engines have become the most popular tools for finding information on the Internet. A real-world Semantic Web application can benefit from this by combining its features with some features from search engines. In this paper, we describe methods for indexing and searching a populated ontology by using an information retrieval tool; its results are enriched with inference. For visualization purposes, all of the retrieved ontology instances are clustered based on their classes; and the clusters are linked using instance properties. The approach is illustrated using our SWHi (Semantic Web for History) prototype as a case study.