This article provides an empirical evaluation of an indexing technology, topic maps (ISO 13250), in the context of an academic task in a higher education context. Topic maps are a form of indexing that define and display the interrelationships between various topics in a given domain, as well as anchor these topics to specific resources that help describe them. The use of topic maps might well alleviate most of the problems associated with current search technologies in course management systems, because keyword-based searching does not allow learners to navigate a corpus of resources effectively. The work reported here is grounded in theories of cognitive information processing, cognitive information retrieval, and ontology development. The evaluation reported in this study shows that graduate learners who used a topic map (n = 18) to find information specific to an ill-structured writing task outperformed those who used a search engine (n = 16). The article concludes with recommendations on how to integrate topic maps into course management systems and provides a platform for future research considerations. (Contains 1 table, 2 figures and 2 notes.)