How location lookups work

Start with a point

Your browser supplies latitude, longitude and an accuracy radius after you choose Find my location. You can also type coordinates or choose a Census place. A place search uses a representative point inside that place; it does not find your street address.

Match the boundaries

County, state and statistical ZIP boundaries come from the US Census Bureau. Time-zone boundaries come from timezone-boundary-builder and OpenStreetMap. The tool downloads a small geographic tile and checks the point in your browser. Source links and release dates are on the data page.

Keep different answers separate

A ZIP Code Tabulation Area is Census geography, not a USPS delivery ZIP. A county equivalent may be a parish, borough, census area or independent city. City boundaries can exclude a nearby suburb even when its mailing address uses the city name. When no ZIP outline contains a point, the tool checks for the nearest outline within about 55 meters, including across a tile edge. That result is labelled nearest ZIP area, not a confirmed containing area. More distant gaps stay unavailable.

Time and terrain

The time-zone map uses the release listed on the data page. Local clock names and offsets use the time-zone rules installed in your browser. They can lag a recent legal change. USGS elevation is an estimate of the ground, not the height of a phone or the floor of a building.

Where this stops

Street-address lookup is not connected. The site does not substitute an IP estimate when device location fails. Census geometry is generalized to about 55 meters, so within roughly that distance of a line the answer may fall on the wrong side. An accuracy circle crossing a county line may contain more than one possible county.

Elevation is shown in whole feet and meters at magnitudes of one or more. Smaller nonzero magnitudes keep one significant digit, including their sign. Terrain cell sizes use three significant digits. These display choices do not establish measurement accuracy.

Finding a mapped beach

The beach search uses named beach landforms in the USGS geographic names service. A town, resort or street-end does not qualify just because its name includes beach. Unnamed beaches are not included. Coast, lake or river type and public access are not recorded, so they remain unknown.

Some named beaches have more than one map reference point. The search preserves those points and ranks a beach by the shortest straight-line distance to one of them. That same point becomes the map and directions destination. It is not an entrance or the closest shoreline edge. Check local access before traveling. The data page gives the source query and retrieval date.

An internet connection is not a physical position

The optional IP lookup asks country.is for the apparent country, city and region of the connection. Its network records come from MaxMind GeoLite2 and Cloudflare. Missing city or region fields stay unavailable; the page does not request or draw an IP-derived coordinate. VPN exits, mobile carriers and company networks can make the estimate disagree with device location. Neither answer overwrites the other.

Checking a surprising answer

Check the coordinate signs and latitude/longitude order, then request a fresh position. For a mailing ZIP, use the full street address in USPS ZIP Code Lookup. For legal boundaries, consult the relevant local office. A correction should identify the disputed field, not include private location details.