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Comment by hnnsj | Hacker News Reader

Well, to some degree, yes. Maybe it's even mostly true. But the fact that point A and B are close to point C by some mode of transportation does not guarantee that they are close to each other. They might be separated by some geographic feature like a river, mountain or large road that doesn't separate them from C. Or the transportation options between A and C and between B and C may be excellent, but horrible between A and B. And so on. You need a normal map, or very good prior knowledge of the geography indeed, to know that.

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If you click on A, you will be able to see if it is close to B or not. Or, more generally, clicking on a few points in a cluster on this map should give you an idea of whether you'll be able to travel easily between places once you get there. So I don't think it's as useless as you are making it out to be.

The system could also split the clusters based on proximity. A simple line between groups of nearby features.

Then again, I fail to see how this is a major improvement over just clicking the first location of interest in an ordered list to generate a new list etc.

My main point is that to me, you're either interested in going to the closest location from where you are, and you'd probably want a brief description of each location to filter out points of interest to you. A list is just as good if not better (since you can quickly glance more information about each place) for that purpose.

Or else you're interested in the geography of the different locations or their exact spatial relationship and then you need a normal map anyway.

Sure, this is a neat geographic data visualization, but I just can't see myself using it in a real world situation.

It's computing the real travel distance so false clustering will mostly happen for longer trips where the obstruction is close to the origin.

It lets you quickly see which search results you're walking toward and want to check the details on. You could get the same info from reading a result list, but if this takes less attention it's a good presentation.

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