You know the lists -- "Best Places to Live," "Healthiest Cites for Women," "Best Cities For Women," "Best Places To Retire," "Great College Towns," "Best Places To Buy A Second Home" and even "Best Places To Raise An Outdoor Family."

What you may not know is that they are all lists generated by the Internet's leading Best-Place-For-This-Or-That list generator, Bert Sperling's Portland, OR-based BestPlaces.net.

At only two years old and still an online upstart, the Web site navigates with the kind of unfettered aplomb the World Wide Web's original designers must have hoped for from Web sites.

That's largely because Sperling has been analyzing people and place data offline for 14 years before he went virtual.

Now his efforts are packaged in an ad-free, unassuming, uncluttered and intuitive interface that lives up to the task at hand -- effortlessly and quickly finding the place where you want to be.

"We try and make the point of keeping it up to date and not swayed by any interest. A lot of people are depending on it more and more all the time and we think it's a responsibility that we remain independent," said Sperling, boasting 10,000 users a day, a number that jumps by a factor of five when one of its lists gets the site mentioned in the media.

The virtual realty reality scheme to find the best locations considers a host of variables beyond the usual schools, jobs and crime measurements to take you places you likely haven't even considered.

"Best Cities for Teens," "Top 25 Asthma Hot Spots," "America's Sweetest Cities," "Most Photogenic Cities," "Most Romantic Cities," "Best and Worst Cities for Skin Care," "Pet Healthiest Cities," and even the "Worst Places for Fleas" are among the unusual locations also pinpointed by BestPlaces.net.

You needn't wait or search for the latest BestPlaces.net list in Money, SELF, Men's Journal, Ladies Home Journal, Newsweek, Seventeen, SmartMoney, Kiplinger's or a host of other affiliate publications.

To help you find your ideal community, the Web site offers an online search engine, a questionnaire called "Find Your Best Place," that lets you consider three and a half dozen determining factors spread over nine categories -- climate, economy, housing, education, health, crime, recreation, arts and culture and transportation.

Once you've found the location of your dreams you can obtain greater detail from the City Profiles and Comparisons section. With statistics for nearly 1,000 U.S. cities the Cities area also offers an in-depth look at what makes locations tick. A comparison feature with 3,000 cities lets you face off two towns for a comparison. Being updated and in the works are a feature that allows you to sort cities in best and worst categories, ZIP code level detail about neighborhoods and a facilities finder for locating the nearest services and retailers.

Other BestPlaces.net features include:

Published: February 7, 2003

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

Broderick Perkins parlayed a career in old-school journalism into a contemporary digital news service that really hits home. The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based editorial content and consulting service specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and related editorial consulting services. The DeadlineNews Group includes the website, DeadlineNews.com, offering real estate editorial content and consulting services, and its back shop, the Deadline Newsroom, an open house on news that really hits home. Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News. Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, RealtyTimes.com, Nolo.com, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Intuit/Quicken among more than three dozen publications. In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins most recently served as chief editorial consultant for Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home, Nolo, and writes real estate television scripts for RealtyTimes.com.