Town Hunter    Home  Site Map   Links   Contact Us  
Powered by TriVee Inc. 
City Data City Search Calculators Support Directory About
Page Help 

Discover new cities
In State:
Similar To:
Help

Search by
House Price
State:
House price:
Help

Search by
Cost-Of-Living
State:
Cost of living value:
Help

Search by
Median Age
State:
Median Age:
Help

Search by
Population size
State:
Population size:
Help

Finding the perfect place

Imagine that you have just gotten a job offer across the country and need to relocate. Or, you have just retired and are looking for a good place to sit in the sun. Or perhaps you just really hate the Midwest! What do you do? Sure there is plenty of help out there once you’ve decided where you want to move to. But how do you decide?

There are tens of thousands of communities around the United States. Each one has its good and bad points. The retiree in our example above might want a warm climate, good access to medical care, and low property taxes. A couple with young children might want to have good schools in their town. A hundred years ago, few people ever moved more than a few miles, and they could gather their information from friends and neighbors. Nowadays, when you might be moving from New England to the West Coast, how do you decide exactly where to go?

The amount of public information available about any given city, or town, or even village, is vast.  Whatever you think is important is almost certainly out there somewhere. But where?  And how?  A truly personalized search needs to take into account which of the hundreds of factors out there are important to you. It also needs to take into account the relative importance of the various factors. And not least, the search has to take into account which ranges of the factors are important to you.

Let's illustrate with an example. Joe is retiring, and wants to move to a place where he can enjoy nice weather, have a hospital nearby, where there are a lot of other people his age, and where the property taxes are low, since he is on a fixed income. Therefore, he wants to search for a place where the annual precipitation is relatively low, where the average low temperature in January is as high as possible, where the number of hospitals is as high as possible, where property taxes are as low as possible, and where the median age of the population is as close to 65 as possible. Joe assigns each of these factors a weight of 20%.

As another example, Karen and Mike are parents of two children about to enter kindergarten. They work near Boston, and want to find a place nearby where the houses are relatively affordable, where the schools are excellent, and where crime is reasonably low, although they are not too worried about that. They assign house prices a weight of 30%, school achievement scores a weight of 30%, school spending in a community a weight of 20%, distance from Boston a weight of 10%, and crime rates a weight of 10%. For crime, they specify that anything better than average for New England is fine.

Any search engine which is used for finding the right place to live has to be flexible enough to handle these kinds of examples, as well as their obvious extensions. It should be able to find a city just like yours, but on the other side of the country.  It should be able to quickly find cities for you, and rank them according to your own criteria.  If you don't have one ideal city, perhaps you can build one , based on several others you know?  You also should be able to do  advanced optimization, which lets you select exactly what to look for. All of the data must be there, but more importantly, the engine needs to know what to do with the data. The real world is not black-and-white, but has a lot of shades of color, and you want your search to distinguish more than just "yes" or "no".

Try out our searches and see if they meet your needs. Have fun, and tell us what you think.

 
Copyright © 2004 TriVee Inc. All rights reserved. Terms of Service  Copyright Policy