City-Data.com is a freely available that compiles information on US cities and counties blending both publicly available records with those available from other private sources and user contributed information. Included on the site are data on income, education, crime, race, weather, housing and other information. This site is maintained by Advameg, Inc., though the company notes that certain information may be hidden or incorrect based on external sources of information. Information sources are not always cited on subpages, and there are numerous disclaimers throughout the site to point to potential inadvertent errors or possible pieces of outdated information. City-Data.com was launched in 2003 and has ranked in the top 100 most frequented websites in the USA (Quantcast Top sites, 2014).
This site also compiles information on features of local interest for a city, county, zip code or neighbourhood, such as public school test scores, hospital ratings, local business information, building permits, property tax assessments, etc. City-Data.com does provide a way for individuals to disassociate names from the street-level address through a submission form located on the particular page.
The website is primarily focused on locations in the USA, though there is a more recent inclusion of Canadian provinces and territories. There is a heavy use of advertisement throughout the website, often in featured Google ads at the top of the search page or sidebar adverts within specific pages.
There are a number of ways to browse and search the website, through either the single search bar on the homepage or browsing through menus located on the top bar of homepage. The search is a Google custom search bar, with specialized refinements tailored to the City-Data.com website. Users browse by state, which will take them to a list of counties or cities from which to select. The navigation on the homepage has the clearest layout with well-designed menus and clean graphics. Subpages are more difficult to navigate in their design, though often have a way to navigate or jump back a few screens.
The forum feature is one of the most used segments of the website, with over 1.5 million registered users and 35 million posts. Forums are broadly categorized by location or topic and are quite active, judging by recent traffic and postings. The forum does provide a way for contributing users to build a positive status through affirmative reviews from other readers.
The site has very limited help features available, with a disclaimer in the contact page that responses may be delayed. City-Data.com also provides an extensive disclaimer that the content should not be published or reproduced elsewhere.
This resource is useful; however, users who value the accuracy of information will need to be aware of ways to verify the information contained in v. There are a number of public databases that have portions of the information contained in this site, and it would be paramount to note that the public databases may often be more accurate and up to date, depending on the rate the data are refreshed in City-Data.com. County auditor websites, Data.gov, the US Department of Justice National Sex Offender public website, Zillow and many other websites would be able to verify or replace some of the searches on City-Data.com. This website can be a useful resource to begin research; however, the reviewer would recommend having a secondary resource to verify the information obtained as a method of good practice. The resource does provide some unique user-added content (forum, comment sections throughout the site and a user submitted photo section), though the researcher should also take this information with caution, as there are few filters in place to verify the content as anything other than individual opinion in many cases.
