The New KartOO is a wonderful example of the role of Two-Dimensional Maps in Search.  Here is their guide:


Cartography: a powerful tool to explore data,  makes use of its sense of orientation.

To move around a city, it is best to have a map with the street index! So why not also use our sense of direction when we search a database or in a search engine results? Since time began, man uses the right side of his brain and more precisely his sense of direction when moving from one location to another. It is this capacity to understand a map naturally that KartOO uses in its cartographic interfaces. The interactive data maps are similar to a road-map:
- The cities are replaced by pages or database results
- The mountains, the roads and the rivers are here thematics, which connect the pages
- The user naturally directs his glance along a thematic to find results, exactly as if it went up a river to find a city.
 Quickly analyze large volumes of information

One of the advantages of the cartography is its capacity to synthesize information. First of all, the interface privileges the graphic objects to text: they take less space to show results due to their form, their order, their symbolic system and their multiple information color. Then, the map is animated: when the mouse passes over an object, its complete description appears with possibly a label. Lastly, information is gathered in clusters, for example, the pages of the same site are represented by a pictogram, which can be spread.

Represent what a simple tree structure cannot show.  The data map makes it possible to show all the links, including the transverse links in a tree structure. In Internet in particular, the information is not held in a simple hierarchy. It is rather a bag of knots, which is disentangled and presented on the screen in the most readable format possible. 

 Use your visual memory

Exactly as we memorize a walk in the countryside, our brain can use the visual indices of the information map to locate itself. KartOO develops, in particular, favourites management systems where the user him/herself places his data. The question “where did I put that?” makes sense if we located information by a color and if we placed it in a corner of the map!

Thanks Jean-Noël for this tip!