By visualise I mostly mean the first thing that comes to your mind. For example, considering the term "search" you may visualise a text box or a relational database or a business plan or some software specifications.
I know there are many programmers/engineers in this community but also many designers and business-oriented people. I think this would make a nice discussion and help us all understand a bit more about how others see things.
As for me, I tend to visualise interfaces and interactions. For "search", I will think of a text box first and then try to think something better (or at least different) than a text box.