Right now, the explore command is as much as useless (independent of implemented search patterns) because there is no feedback of things an automated explorer discovers and on a large (that is, immense, insane, whatever) map I cannot manually check every turn all my automated explorers.
One simple solution to this would be to automatically show all movements of automated explorers (better: all automated ships, even better: give us options for explorer only / all automated ships / all ships with a destination more than 1 turn away) on turn change.
Another (not so good) solution would be to generate messages about discovered things like anomalies, resources, relics, enemy ships and so on.