SearchLens has influenced subsequent research by introducing the composable "lens" metaphor for user-defined weighted keyword collections—directly extended into polymorphic lenses over knowledge graphs—while also serving as a reference design for augmenting faceted search with user-specified criteria, informing visual explanation techniques such as color-encoded keyword-result associations and space-filling relevance representations in exploratory search interfaces, motivating tools for structuring and synthesizing information during complex sensemaking tasks, and prompting investigation into the adequacy of cosine similarity for subjective tag matching in search systems.