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It is always tempting, when organizing search results over a variety of data sets, to organize those results by data set.  It's easy, programmatically, and to someone who is working on the system and is intimately familiar with all the databases, it makes sense.  I've seen this done in medical, industrial, insurance, and manufacturing databases.  It is very common.

It is not the best way to present search results to users, however.  Ancestry.com is working hard to prove this point.

The Drums tool in GarageBand for iPad includes a beautiful new interface that I think has potential as a design pattern for many different kinds of information access and organization.  It is a matrix of 2 scales: simple to complex and quiet to loud.  Instruments can be dragged into the squares on the matrix from the left, or the die on the right will assign instruments across the matrix.  The play button then plays the instruments together, using the matrix as a guide.