Chapter 15

More Shopping, Less Dropping

In This Chapter

Discovering the pros and cons of shopping online

Using your credit card online without fear

Shopping step-by-step

Finding the lowest price

Finding airline tickets, books, clothes, computers, food, and mutual funds online

Lots of opinions about what you should buy

We’ve gone shopping on the Internet, and we’ve gone shopping in the souq in Marrakech. The experiences were surprisingly similar except that the souq smelled more interesting and probably had more live snakes. The Internet is the world’s biggest bazaar, with stores that carry everything from books to blouses, from DVDs to prescription drugs, from mutual funds to musical instruments, and from plane tickets to, uh, specialized personal products. (Don’t read too much into that one.) Shopping online is convenient — no parking or standing in line — and you can compare prices easily. But is online shopping safe? Well, we’ve bought all kinds of products online, and we’re still alive to tell the tale. (We got a nice rug in the souq, too.)

Shopping Online: Pros and Cons

Here are some reasons for shopping online:

• Online stores are convenient and open all night, and they don’t mind if you aren’t wearing shoes or if you window-shop for a week before you buy something.
• Prices are often lower online, and you can compare prices at several online establishments in a matter of minutes. Even if you eventually make your purchase in a brick-and-mortar store, the information you find online can save you money. Shipping and handling is usually the same as you pay for mail order (although some sites offer free shipping for large orders or customers in a “Prime” program), and you don’t have to drive or park.
• Online stores can sometimes offer a better selection. They usually ship directly from the warehouse rather than keeping stock on the shelf at dozens of branches. If you’re looking for an item that’s hard to find — for example, a part for that vintage toaster oven you’re repairing — the web can save you weeks of searching.
• Sometimes, stuff just isn’t available locally, and buying online can save you a trip. (The authors of this book live in small rural towns. Trumansburg, New York, is a wonderful place, but if you want to buy a new toaster, you’re out of luck. And Margy couldn’t find a harmonium anywhere in the Champlain Valley.)
• Some online stores offer smartphone apps. When someone tells Margy about an interesting book, she’s likely to order it on the spot, using an online bookseller’s iPhone app.
• Unlike malls, online stores don’t have Muzak. (A few websites play background music, but we don’t linger on those sites.)

On the other hand, here are some reasons that you shouldn’t buy everything on the Net:

• You can’t physically look at or try on stuff before you buy it, and in most cases, you have to wait for it to be shipped to you. (We haven’t had much luck buying pants online, f’rinstance.)
• Your local stores deserve support so that they’ll be there when you need something right now or need their help in picking something out.
• You can’t flirt with the staff at a web store or find out the latest town gossip.

The Credit Card Question

How do you pay for products you buy online? Usually, you pay by credit card, the same way you pay for anything else. Isn’t it incredibly, awfully dangerous to give out your credit card number online, though? Well, no.

When you use “plastic” at a restaurant, you give your physical card with your physical signature to the server, who takes it to the back room, does who-knows-what with it, and then brings it back. Compared with that, the risk of sending your number to an online store is pretty small. A friend of ours used to run a restaurant and later an online store and assures us that there’s no comparison: The online store had none of the credit card problems that the restaurant did.

Many books (including earlier editions of this one) made a big deal about whether a website has a security certificate, which means that it shows a little lock in the corner of the web browser window. The lock is nice to have, but the problem it solves — bad guys snooping on the connection somewhere between your PC and the seller’s web site — isn’t a likely one unless you’re using a public wireless network connection at a coffee shop or the like. We think you should worry more about whether a store selling something is run well enough that it ships you the item you bought. Recent security breaches that revealed credit card numbers to crooks came about when those crooks broke into a store’s database, not snooped on your Internet connection.

Credit cards and debit cards look the same and spend the same, but credit cards bill you at the end of the month whereas debit cards take the money right out of your bank account. In the United States, consumer protection laws are much stronger for credit cards. The important difference is that in case of a disputed transaction, you have the money if you used a credit card but they have it if you used a debit card. Use a credit card to get the better protection, and then pay the bill at the end of the month so that you don’t owe interest.

If, after this harangue, you still don’t want to send your credit card number over the Internet, most online stores are happy to have you call in your card number over the phone (although, likely as not, an operator halfway around the globe then enters your credit card number by using the Internet). If you’re one of those fiscally responsible holdouts who doesn’t “do plastic,” send a check or money order.

Paying at the Store

Buying stuff at an online store isn’t much different from buying it at a regular store. Most stores hope you will buy several items at a time, so they use shopping carts. As you click your way around a site, you can toss items into your cart, adding and removing them as you want, by clicking a button labeled something like Add Item or Buy Now. When you have the items you want, you visit the virtual checkout line and buy the items in your cart, at which point you tell them where to send them and how you’re paying. Until you visit the checkout, you can always take the items out of your cart if you decide that you don’t want them, and at online stores they don’t become shopworn, no matter how often you do that.

Figure 15-1 shows the shopping cart at an online book store we like, with two items in it. When you click the Secure Checkout button, the next page asks for the rest of your order details.

Some stores even have the online equivalents of layaway plans and gift registries. For example, some web shopping sites let you add items to a wish list that you can share with your friends so that you or someone else can buy the item for you later. Some sites offer gift certificates, too, for shopping online. Most online stores encourage you to create an account with a password so that if you return to the site it can remember your name, address, and payment method.

Be sure to look for a checkbox or link that allows you to decline to receive offers and notices from the retailed, unless you really want them.

How Little Do You Want to Pay?

As little as possible, of course. About 15 minutes after the second online store appeared, someone realized that you could look at the stores to find who charges how much for which item and then report back on your own website. Price comparison sites work well if you can exactly identify the products you want to buy. For books, consumer electronics, computers, and computer parts, it’s always worth a look. But if you’re looking for khaki pants, no two pairs are the same, and most of us would rather pay an extra ten bucks to avoid a pair that makes us look like a spandex-wrapped potato.

Comparison sites now work two ways. One is to visit store sites and scrape (copy) the prices. The other is to make a deal with interested stores and let them upload their prices directly, typically in return for a commission when users click through. Both methods work okay, but we have seen comparison sites showing different prices from the ones you see if you visit the store site directly. Here are a few of our favorites:

• Google Shopping (www.google.com/products) is the latest incarnation of the Google price comparison site that was originally named Froogle. Stores upload prices, but Google doesn’t charge them. (The search pages have ads on the right.) The searching is helpful, but the inventory is spotty.
• ISBN.NU (isbn.nu) checks prices for new books at a dozen online stores and tells you which one has the best price. The site scrapes the prices and then uses the stores’ affiliate programs to get paid.
• MySimon (www.mysimon.com) compares prices from a wide variety of online stores. Owned by CBS Interactive which also owns tech news site Cnet.
• Shopping.com (www.shopping.com) is eBay’s comparison site, which compares many online stores including, of course, eBay.
• Nextag (www.nextag.com) also covers a wide range of products. Stores pay to be listed, so you should check other sites, too.
• Pricegrabber (www.pricegrabber.com) has good coverage of everything from musical instruments to computer parts.
• Red Laser is an iPhone and Android app (available from the App Store or Google Play Store) that enables you to scan a barcode while you are standing in a store. It then displays a list of online stores that sell it, with prices. It’s owned by eBay.

If you are ordering from an online store for the first time, you may want to check its reputation at www.resellerratings.com and read reviews from past customers.

Up, Up, and Away

We buy lots of airline tickets online. Although the online travel sites aren’t as good as the very best human travel agents, the sites are now better than most agents and vastly better than bad travel agents. Even if you have a good agent, online sites let you look around to see your options before you get on the phone. Some airlines offer on their own websites some cheap fares that aren’t available any other way. The airlines know that it costs them much less to let the web do the work, and they pay you (sometimes in the form of a hefty discount) to use their web sites.

The theory of airline tickets

Three giant airline computer systems in the United States — Sabre, Galileo/Worldspan (two formerly separate systems that merged), and Amadeus — handle nearly all airline reservations in the United States. (A site such as this is known as a CRS, or a computer reservations systems, or a GDS, for global distribution system.) Google’s ITA Software, which we discuss below, is trying to get into the GDS business, although so far their only GDS customer is Cape Air, a small regional airline.

Although every airline has a “home” GDS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any GDS. Some low-price, start-up airlines are available by way of GDS, but others — notably, Southwest — don’t participate in any of these systems but have instead their own websites, where you can check flights and buy tickets.

In theory, all these systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get a little out of sync with each other. If you’re looking for seats on a sold-out flight, an airline’s home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you’re looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all three systems (using different travel websites) because a fare that’s marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Also check Orbitz (www.orbitz.com) which has direct-connect access to many airlines, bypassing GDS altogether.

Some fare categories are visible only to travel agents and don’t appear on any websites, particularly if you aren’t staying over a weekend or you’re taking a complicated international trip, so check with a good agent before buying if you’re taking a short expensive trip during the week or an international trip more complex than a round trip. On the other hand, many airlines offer some special deals that are only on their websites and that agents often don’t know about. Confused? You should be. We have been.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set by way of the IATA (International Air Transportation Association) cartel, so computer systems usually list only IATA fares for international flights. If you need to buy tickets sooner than a month ahead, you can often find entirely legal consolidator tickets for considerably less than the official price, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for finding the best price. International airlines also have some impressive online offers, most notably from Cathay Pacific, which usually has a pass that includes a ticket from the United States to Hong Kong and then unlimited travel all over Asia.

Here’s our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

• Check online systems. See which flights are available and the range of prices. Check sites that use different GDSs. (We list some sites at the end of this section.)
• After you find a likely airline, check that airline’s site. Look for special, web-only deals. If a low-fare airline flies the route, be sure to check that one, too.
• Check prices on flights serving all nearby airports. An extra 45 minutes of driving time can save you hundreds of dollars.
• For a trip more complicated than a simple round trip, check with a travel agent. You can check by phone, email, or the agent’s website to see whether he can beat the online price, and buy your tickets from the agent unless the online deal is better.
• For international tickets, check for consolidator tickets. Do everything in this list and check both online and with your agent, particularly if you don’t qualify for the lowest published fare. For complex international trips, such as around the world, agents can usually find routes and prices that the automated systems can’t.
• Don’t overbid. If you bid on airline tickets at a travel auction website, make sure that you already know the price at which you can buy the ticket.

Before looking at online agents, check out ITA Software (www.itasoftware.com). This company produces the fare search engine used by Orbitz and many airline sites. ITA’s own site has a version that just searches and doesn’t try to sell you any tickets, with more search options than most of its clients offer. They’ve been bought by Google, and their results are also integrated into some Google searches.

If you hate flying or would rather take the train, Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada offer online reservations (www.amtrak.com and www.viarail.ca). If you’re visiting Europe, a Eurailpass at www.raileurope.com can make sense if you plan to take a whole lot of trains, or check schedules and fares for most European railways at the excellent Loco2 at https://loco2.com or Capitaine Train at https://www.capitainetrain.com. You can also book cruises online. (If a travel site is in another language, look around for an “English” link, or an America, Canadian, or U.K. flag to switch it to English.)

Major airline ticket sites, other than individual airlines, include

• Expedia (www.expedia.com): The Microsoft entry into the travel biz is now a part of the Interactive media empire.
• Hotwire (www.hotwire.com): This multi-airline site offers discounted leftover tickets and rental cars and hotels.
• Orbitz (www.orbitz.com): Orbitz is the high-tech entry into the travel biz, with most airlines’ weekly web specials.
• Priceline (www.priceline.com) Priceline has cheezy TV ads with the guy who no longer looks much like the captain of the Starship Enterprise. They now offer discounted tickets like Hotwire, the “name your own price” reverse auction for which they’re best known, and regular tickets like other agents.
• Travelocity (www.travelocity.com): Travelocity is the Sabre entry into the travel biz. Yahoo! Travel and the AOL travel section are both Travelocity underneath.

Fare-comparison sites abound, including Kayak (www.kayak.com), Mobissimo (www.mobissimo.com), Hipmunk (www.hipmunk.com) and FareCompare (www.farecompare.com). We don’t find any of them comprehensive enough to depend on, but they’re worth a look if you want to try to find that elusive last cheap seat. Most can also help you book hotels and rental cars, too.

More about online airlines

Because the online airline situation changes weekly, anything more we print here would be out of date before you read it. One author of this book is an air travel nerd in his spare time; to see his current list of online airline websites, web specials, and online travel agents, visit http://airinfo.travel.

Even More Places to Shop

Here are a few other places for you to shop on the web. We have even bought stuff from most of them.

Auctions and used stuff

You can participate in online auctions of everything from computers and computer parts to antiques to vacation packages. Online auctions resemble any other kind of auction in at least one respect: If you know what you’re looking for and know what it’s worth, you can find some outstanding values; if you don’t, you can easily overpay for junk. We’ve found replacement parts for a blender, and plates in bowls in our discontinued china pattern.

Many auctions — notably, eBay (as shown in Figure 15-2) — also allow you to list your own stuff for sale, which can be a way to get rid of some of your household clutter a little more discreetly than in a yard sale. The PayPal service (www.paypal.com), now owned by eBay, lets you accept credit card payment from the highest bidder by email. (See Chapter 16 for more information about PayPal.)

Online auction sites include

• eBay (http://www.ebay.com): This auction site is the most popular one on the web, and people flock there to sell all sorts of stuff, from baby clothes and toys to computer parts to cars to the occasional tropical island. You can sell stuff, too, by registering as a seller. eBay charges a small commission for auctions, which the seller pays. Searching the completed auctions at eBay is also a terrific way to find out how much an item is worth — you can see what people end up paying for items. If you’re thinking of selling that rare Beanie Baby, search the completed auctions for the bad news that it’s worth slightly less than it was when it was new and for ideas about how to write an effective description.
• Half.com (www.half.com): This division of eBay is more like a consignment shop than an auction. Sellers list used items they want to sell at a fixed price, such as books (including textbooks), CDs, movies, video games, electronic equipment, and trading cards. eBay maintains that it’ll merge this site into its main eBay site, but it never does.

Craigslist

Craigslist (craigslist.org), Figure 15-3, is the website that your local newspaper hates the most, because it’s just like the classified ads, only free. It has subsites for cities large and small all over the world, where you can find everything from a used car to a new apartment, job, or boyfriend. Unlike eBay, Craigslist listings are supposed to be local, so the two parties (we’d say buyer and seller, but some of the ads are for personals) can meet in person to complete the deal. Nearly all ads are free; they only charge for real estate ads in a few large cities, which brings in enough money to pay for everything else.

We’ve had good luck buying and selling appliances, cars, and even an elderly Sunfish sailboat on Craigslist. They do a good job of policing bogus ads, but see the earlier section “Don’t fall for these online scams” to know what to watch out for.

Books, music, and more

You can’t flip through the books in an online bookstore as easily as you can in person (although Amazon.com comes close by offering a selection of pages from many books). However, if you know what you want, you can find good deals.

Here are some top sites:

• AbeBooks: This site, formerly Advanced Book Exchange, offers the combined catalogs of thousands of secondhand booksellers at www.abebooks.com. You pay the same price as you would in a used-book shop (plus shipping, of course), and you save hours of searching. Whether you’re looking for a favorite book from your childhood or a rare, first-edition For Dummies book, this site is worth visiting.
• AddALL: AddALL (www.addall.com) is another good used-book site offering titles from thousands of used-book stores as well as a price comparison service for new books.
• Amazon.com: One of the great online-commerce success stories (at www.amazon.com) sprang up from nothing — if you call several million dollars of seed money nothing — to become one of the Net’s biggest online stores. Amazon.com has an enormous catalog of books and CDs and an equally enormous and growing variety of other junk, much of which can get to you in a few days. It also has an affiliates program in which other websites can refer you to their favorite books for sale at Amazon, creating sort of a virtual virtual-bookstore. Amazon sells most books at less than list price, and in most cases also has used copies from independent sellers. It also has used books, DVDs, and just about everything else from pogo sticks to underwear.
• Barnes and Noble: Barnes & Noble (www.bn.com) is the biggest bookstore chain in the United States, and its online bookstore is big, complete, and well done. You can even return online purchases at any of its stores. It also has a large selection of music.
• Kobo: Kobo supports your local bookshop, so you can buy books online without guilt. When you sign up for an account, Kobo asks you to identify your favorite independent bookstore and give them a cut.
• Powell’s Books: The largest independent (nonchain) bookstore in the United States has a correspondingly large website (www.powellbooks.com) offering new and used books. We like its email newsletter with new and rediscovered books and author interviews.

Clothes

This section points out a few familiar clothing merchants with online stores. A little Googlage can find hundreds of other stores, both familiar and obscure:

• Eddie Bauer: This site (www.eddiebauer.com) has way more stuff than is available in its stores. (John gave up on the stores about the third time they said, “Oh, you have to order that from the website.”)
• The Gap: This site (www.gap.com) has the same stuff you find in its stores, but for people of unusual vertical or horizontal dimension, it also has jeans in sizes the stores don’t stock, as well as links to Banana Republic and Old Navy, its upscale and downscale divisions.
• Lands’ End: Most of this catalog is online (www.landsend.com), and you can order anything you find in any of its individual printed catalogs along with online-only discounted overstocks. It also has plenty of the folksy blather that encourages you to think of the company in terms of a few folks in the cornfields of Wisconsin rather than a corporate mail-order colossus belonging to Sears Roebuck. (It’s both.)
• REI: This large sports-equipment and outdoor-wear co-op is headquartered in Seattle. Members receive a small rebate on purchases. The whole catalog is online (www.rei.com), and you can find occasional online specials and discounts.

Computers

When you’re shopping for computer hardware online, be sure that the vendor you’re considering offers both a good return policy (in case the computer doesn’t work when it arrives) and a long warranty.

Here are a few well-known vendors:

• Apple Computer: The Apple site (store.apple.com) has lots of information about Macintosh computers, and now it offers online purchasing of the iPad, iPod, and iPhone, too.
• Best Buy: This site (www.bestbuy.com) is the online version of the ubiquitous big-box store. Orders can be shipped, or you can pick them up at your local store.
• CDW: CDW (www.cdw.com) has a good selection of hardware and software, and we’ve found it to be reliable.
• Dell Computers: This site has an extensive catalog with online ordering and custom computer system configurations (www.dell.com).
• Newegg (www.newegg.com) We have no idea where the name came from, but we’ve found them to be a reliable source of computer and electronic equipment.
• Other World Computing (www.macsales.com) is great for Macs and accessories.
• PC Connection and Mac Connection: For computer hardware, software, and accessories, PC and Mac Connection (www.pcconnection.com and www.macconnection.com) is one of the oldest and most reliable online computer retailers. And, you can specify overnight delivery within the continental United States even if you order as late as 2 a.m.!

Food

To show the range of edibles available online, here are some of our favorite places to point, click, and chow down:

• Bobolink Dairy: A recovering software nerd and his family in rural New Jersey make and sell their own cheese — a rich, gooey, French-style cheese. Its URL (www.cowsoutside.com) refers to cows out in the pasture rather than tied up in the barn.
• Cabot Creamery: This site (www.cabotcheese.coop) sells some of the best cheddar in Vermont. (Don’t tell anyone that a lot of the milk comes from New York.)
• Gaspar’s (www.linguica.com): If you weren’t aware that Portuguese garlic sausage is one of the four basic food groups, this site will fix that problem. Oddly, online orders incur steep shipping charges, but phone or fax orders are shipped free, so we print and fax the order form. Also check out the competition at www.amarals.com. Both have Autocrat Coffee Syrup, which will inspire gasps of recognition from anyone who grew up in Rhode Island.
• Gimme Coffee: This site (www.gimmecoffee.com) features highly opinionated coffee from the wilds of upstate New York. Gimme Coffee has online orders and lots of advice on what to do with your coffee after it arrives; follow the Gimme Locations link to find pictures of the place John goes when he’s in need of literary inspiration, also known as caffeine.
• The Kitchen Link: Search this site (www.kitchenlink.com) for the perfect recipe and then shop for the ingredients.
• Peapod: Peapod (www.peapod.com) lets you shop for groceries online and then delivers them to your home. You have to live in an area that the parent grocery chains serve — the northeast (Stop and Shop), Washington DC and Philadelphia (Giant), and Chicago areas. If you live somewhere else, Netgrocer (www.netgrocer.com) delivers nonperishables by rather pricey overnight express, and perishables in a limited area near its New Jersey headquarters.

More Opinions Than You Ever Imagined

With all the products available to buy on the web, how can you decide what to get? Fortunately, you aren’t on your own. Lots and lots of websites offer you advice on everything from cruise ships to restaurants to used cars. Many of these sites are part of Web 2.0, a jargonful way to say that most of what’s on the website was contributed by the users. This concept has two helpful benefits: You get the combined experience of all those users, and the website gets all that stuff for free. In many cases, sites show a combination of professional reviews and user comments, which would be Web 1½. Here are some review sites we’ve found useful.

Travel and food

Travel guidebooks have been around since Baedeker in the 1820s, and restaurant guides at least since Michelin in 1900. Now they’ve moved online, so you can check out the advice and then let them know if you disagree:

• Yelp: (yelp.com) Yelp, Figure 15-4, is the most comprehensive city guide around, with geographically organized reviews of everything from car dealers to restaurants to botanical gardens. It’s a good spot to look for places to eat.
• TripAdvisor: (tripadvisor.com) As its name suggests, it’s a site for travelers. Type a place name, and it tells you where to stay, what to see, and perhaps how to get there. The site is aimed more at people visiting an area, as opposed to Yelp, which is more for people who live there. The company has an empire of related travel websites including seatguru.com (where to sit on a plane) and flipkey.com (vacation house rentals.) Hotel owners take their reviews seriously and often respond directly to particularly good or bad ones.
• Zagat: Zagat (zagat.com) made the leap from printed guides to online quite successfully. Everything in the printed guides is on the website, and web reviews are now the main material for the printed guides. Basic information is available for free, and access to full reviews requires a subscription. If you contribute reviews, the site often comps subscriptions or sends you the next printed guide. Recently sold to Google, who say they plan to integrate its reviews into their local searches.

  

• OpenTable: (opentable.com) The largest site for making restaurant reservations, it also has reviews from both their own users and Zagat. We use it to quickly find out who has a table and at what time tonight.
• Via Michelin: (viamichelin.com) The famous Michelin guides made the transition to online as well. It has restaurant reviews for much of Europe, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and hotel and sightseeing guides for nearly everywhere. Reviews show both their professional reviews and user comments.

Vroom, vroom

A car is one of the biggest purchases most of us make. Now you can do your research so that by the time you reach the dealer, you probably know more about the car you want to buy than the salesman does. Let these sites help you:

• Edmunds: (edmunds.com) This site is where we start looking for a car. It has reviews of new and used cars (both professional and user contributed), listings of vehicles for sale, and typical sale prices so that you have a good idea of how much you should pay.
• Cars.com: (cars.com) Remember back when you looked for a car in the classified ads in the paper instead of pointing and clicking? The papers have realized that the ads aren’t coming back to the paper, so five large newspaper chains jointly run Cars.com. Its original purpose was to be the online version of the classifieds so that the papers could compete with online markets such as Craigslist. Now the site has expanded to become a full-service car info site. If you want to buy or sell a used car, be sure to check the suggested Kelly price on Cars.com and the Edmunds price, because they’re often quite different.
• Dealerrater: (dealerrater.com) This site just has ratings of car dealers, for both sales and service. The dealers take their ratings quite seriously, so it’s worth letting the world know when you have a particularly good or bad experience.

For that even bigger purchase, a place to live, Yelp has reviews of real estate agents and apartments.

Real Estate

Imagine you’re walking the dog along the street, you pass a house with a “For Sale” sign, whip out your smartphone, check the asking price, and say, “Hah! They’ll never get that much.” We’d never do anything that crass, but, uh, we know some people who do, that’s it.

Since real estate sales and tax assessments are public information, recorded with the local government, and real estate offered for sale is almost always published online by the selling agent, there are impressively comprehensive databases of prices. The two major public sites are Zillow and Trulia:

• Zillow (www.zillow.com) is our favorite real estate info site. They have maps of most of the country so you can pick an area and it’ll show you a map with all of the local real estate for sale, Figure 15-5. If you zoom in, you can see individual lots. Real estate voyeurs enjoy their Zestimates of how much a property listed for sale will really sell for, and their estimated values of every other house, as well. If you’re in the market, they have info about taxes and schools, and links to agents who can show you the house. They have nice apps for smartphones and tablets that can automatically show you the map for where you are right now.
• Trulia (www.trulia.com) is a lot like Zillow, and will become even more similar, since they’re planning to merge. But their maps are a little different, and it’s worth looking at both to see which you prefer.

Many county and city assessment departments put all or part of their information online, which can provide an amazing amount of detail both for seeing if your assessment is in line with the neighbors, or looking at what the housing is like in a place you might want to move.

Real estate, temporary version

Zillow and Trulia also show real estate for rent, both for long term living and in some areas for short term vacations. Vacationers and other travelers also have these options, offering short term rentals direct from the property owners:

• Airbnb (www.airbnb.com) offers everything from a couch in someone’s spare room to fully furnished houses for short term visits, both in the US and other countries. We’ve found a cute little studio in Paris (up four narrow flights of stairs, but that’s Paris for you) and a beautiful apartment in Montreal.
• HomeAway (www.homeaway.com) has vacation rentals from all over the world.
• FlipKey (www.flipkey.com) is part of TripAdvisor, with vacation rentals.

Questions and Answers

Several sites match people with questions and people with answers. Ask anything, and as likely as not you’ll get answers. Often the answers are even correct. (This problem is a chronic one.) All of them organize questions by topic, so you can browse existing answered and unanswered questions and write your own questions and answers. The usual suspects include

• Answers.com: The largest Q-and-A site has a huge range of topics. The questions range from middle schoolers who want you to do their homework (“What was the cold war?”) to complex questions about science and finance. The system does a good job of guessing when a new question is the same as an old one and linking them.
• Quora: A more recent entry in the Q and A biz, Quora (quora.com) appeals to a more business-oriented and professional audience. Rather than put questions into categories, they tag questions with keywords so that you can look for questions about Bank and New Jersey or the like. A surprising number of real world experts participate, such as Burton Malkiel, the father of index mutual finds, who answers a lot of investment questions.
• Yahoo! Answers: (answers.yahoo.com) This site is similar to Answers.com but has a younger crowd and an unfortunate tendency for the answers to be wrong.