A Find GNIS task has recently been added to the Community Showcase on Explorer's Resource Center. This task was authored by Michael Waltuch of the Explorer development team, who would also like to acknowledge Dwight S. Hughes of the USGS for his invaluable help.

For those not familiar with the GNIS, the USGS Web site states:

The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), developed by the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, contains information about physical and cultural geographic features in the United States and associated areas, both current and historical (not including roads and highways). The database holds the Federally recognized name of each feature and defines the location of the feature by state, county, USGS topographic map, and geographic coordinates.

The task queries the GNIS database and returns results that locate physical and cultural geographic features of all types in the United States and associated areas. To return results, select a state or territory name, a county or sub-unit name (optional), and a feature type you’re interested in. There are over 1.98 million features of 65 types in the GNIS.

The task is easy to access from the Resource Center, just open it from Explorer (click Help, then ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center...) and then click the Share tab, then scroll down the list until you see it. Just click, and it will be added to your Explorer tasks.

Here's an example query shown in the Find GNIS task:

And here's the result: