An apparatus and a method increase data exploration and facilitate changing between exploratory and iterative searching. A virtual widget is movable on a display device in response to detected user gestures. Graphic objects are displayed on the display device, representing respective documents in a search document collection. The virtual widget is populated with a first query term, which can be used for an iterative search. Semantic terms that are predicted to be semantically related to it are identified, based on a computed similarity between multidimensional representations of terms in a training document collection. The multidimensional representations are output by a semantic model which takes into account context of the respective terms in the training document collection. A user selects one of the set of semantic terms for generating a semantic query for an exploratory search. Documents in the search document collection that are responsive to the semantic query are identified.