Find Place is one of the default tasks that you see when you first start Explorer. It's a handy way to locate cities, towns, airports, zipcodes, and the like. But what about other places, like place names on a topo map? That's where the GeoNames Search task can be used to complement Find Place, and leverage the vast GeoNames.org database.

Here's a video showing how you can use GeoNames Search:

Now let's take a closer look. We've been given directions to go to West Glacier, Montana, and then drive to a place called The Loop where we can find the trailhead to go to Swiftcurrent Pass, our final destination. We've added the topo layer from the resource center already, and that's where we begin.

Using Find Place, we locate West Glacier, Montana.

To locate The Loop and Swiftcurrent Pass, both placenames on the topo map, we open the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center to add the GeoNames Search task.

GeoNames Search searches the GeoNames (geonames.org) geographical database. It returns geo-referenced candidates from which you can create results or use for navigation. The database contains over eight million geographical names and consists of 6.5 million unique features.

Here we've entered The Loop in the GeoNames Search. Note that because "The Loop" is such a common placename we've bumped up our maimum number of names to show from 10 to 20 to find the one in Montana. After we find it, we check it and then choose Create Result.

Next we enter Swiftcurrent Pass, and create another result.

And now our map has all three locations, one found using Find Place, and the other two found using GeoNames Search.