It’s one thing to talk about online mapping tools in the abstract, or to play around with them a little bit, but quite another to use them to achieve a specific goal. James Fee’s recent experience using a few different online systems to look for a new house is therefore instructive. He found that the best results came from a combination of Zillow and Virtual Earth, which, he says, “was just killer in finding the house I wanted in the location I wanted. I figured I’d be using Google Earth for this exercise, but Virtual Earth’s scratch pad is so valuable with sharing multiple points of interest that I never even bothered with Google’s products.”