The map under your search results

What you are looking at

Every pin is a price, not a dot — the cheapest open night in the next 90 days among the units that match — because the list already answered "is there something there". When your search carries dates, the card in the list shows the fuller number: the whole stay, fees and taxes included. The pin does not.

A pin sits in the place's area rather than on its door; the exact spot waits for a booking. Clicking a pin opens the listing.

The map is Google's. Scrolling over it moves the page, not the map: hold Ctrl (⌘ on a Mac) while you scroll, pinch, or use the + and − in its corner to zoom.

Once you search, a wide screen shows the map beside the results, and it stays put while they scroll. On a phone, or while you are just browsing, it sits underneath.

It pins the whole search, not the page

Results come 24 to a page; the map pins every match. A map that redrew itself when you turned a page would be a map you stop trusting.

Places that cannot be pinned

A host who never placed their property on a map still lists and still books — there is simply nowhere to draw them. On an ordinary search the heading above the map says so, in the form "12 of 14, 2 have no location yet", or "one has no location yet" when it is a single place.

Two things that heading will not tell you:

• If nothing in your results has a location, there is no map at all. The whole block is hidden rather than shown empty.
• Once you have pressed Search this area, places with no coordinates are already out of the count, so the heading says nothing about them.

Search this area

Move or zoom the map and a Search this area button appears. It only appears once you have actually moved it: offering to search the area already on screen is a button that does nothing.

Pressing it puts the edges of the view — north, south, east and west — in the address bar, so a searched area is a link you can send or bookmark, and it takes you back to page one. Clear area removes it again.

One thing to know: an area search leaves out every place with no coordinates. The question you asked was "what is here", and a place whose location nobody knows cannot be claimed to be here.

The map on a listing page is a different map

That one shows a shaded circle about a kilometre across, with the place somewhere inside it — never at its middle — and no pin: "Somewhere inside the circle." Only a host who has chosen to show the exact location gets a dot on the house. The street address waits for your booking either way.