How to use it
- Press Find me and allow the browser to use your location.
- Read the city, town or village in the first card, and the nearest larger places with their distance and direction in the table.
- Type a place, click the map, or drag the pin to check another point.
5 practical uses
- Name the town you are driving through, or the one behind the next hill.
- Find the nearest larger cities and how far they are, for fuel, a hospital or a station.
- Tag a photo, a run or a field note with the right place name.
- Check whether an address falls inside the city limits or a suburb.
- Find the city and the region for a coordinate pair from a spreadsheet.
The maths behind it
The geocoder names the smallest place whose boundary holds the point. The nearest-cities table uses the haversine formula for the great-circle distance from the point to each place, d = 2R·asin(√(sin²(Δφ/2) + cos φ₁ cos φ₂ sin²(Δλ/2))), and the bearing from the forward azimuth formula.
How accurate it is
A phone with GPS is accurate to a few metres outdoors; a laptop on Wi-Fi is often within a hundred metres, and a wired desktop may be placed at the nearest exchange, a town away. Near a boundary, drag the pin to check. Which name counts as "the city" is the geocoder's choice: in a large city it may name the borough or the district first. The nearest-cities list uses GeoNames places with 5,000 or more people.
Privacy
The page never stores your position. The link in the address bar carries the coordinates so you can share or bookmark the result; clear it if you would rather not.