Locus

Describe the place you want in plain English; get five real ones back, each with a reason.

Locus does one thing: you describe a place in plain English, and it finds real ones. Every morning a research pass — grounded in live search, not guesswork — refreshes a rotating slice of the map across Seattle, LA, and New York, so any given corner of it is a few days old rather than live. Your query gets matched against whatever it's found, then a second pass ranks the top five and writes a line on why each fits. It tells you how it read your query, too, so you can see when it has guessed the wrong city. It's not perfect: a rating or price often goes missing rather than get guessed, and sometimes nothing in the list genuinely fits and it says so instead of padding. Better an honest gap than a made-up number. But it beats panning around a map, most of the time.