What is the "By Example" feature, and what's it for?

Not to brag, but the By Example feature is pretty cool! With it, you select some of your favorite places and use them to help find your ideal happy place.

Start by selecting the "By Example" tab and then the "Add a Place..." button.

Type a city or county in the search bar until you see your desired location. Then select it. In our case, we are using Seattle, WA (King County) since we picked on them elsewhere. 😉

You can add as many other locations as you like. In our example, we will select Boulder, CO, and Marin County, CA.

You will notice that as we add locations, the filters below change their percentages. Those percentages represent the correlation between the various locations you selected. In our case, Marin, Boulder, and King Counties all have similar Broadband Internet access (99%), and Median Home Prices (99%). You will also notice that there is little correlation (14%) for Sunny Days since Marin County is fairly sunny and Seattle is not.

The Top 10 Filters are those that are commonly selected by many users. If you scroll down the list, you will see all the remaining filters in order of their correlation.

Some of the correlations will be meaningful to you (e.g., each of the three locations have no Summer Mugginess and lots of Hiking options), while others (e.g., Fire Ants) may not.

So what you need to do is select (+) the wishes that are meaningful to you. In our example below, we selected Major Airports, Hiking, Major City Proximity, Political Orientation, and Broadband Internet. Notice that by activating those wishes, you didn't have to select your desired range. We used the locations you picked to establish the bounds for each of the wish categories you activated. Cool, huh!

You are free to select any additional wish categories that are important to you, and you can also adjust the wish limits to whatever you like.

Having done that, you can see in the matching results those locations that completely fit your requirements or those that are at least close.

You can FAVORITE (❤) those that you want to investigate more closely. And don't forget to SHARE your findings with others so they can tell you what they know about these areas too. Just click the button at the top of the map page.