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All the places appearing on
the map are identified by idividually recognizable, coded icons.
 
The Never-Search for Golf
Travel Map
a golf oriented
travel planning tool for 18,475 courses
Golf
Product Review by Joe Stine,
Editor - Florida Golf Magazine
For
golfers that enjoy traveling and playing different courses around
the country, finding, selecting and keeping track of courses
they want to play can be a difficult and time consuming and often
frustrating task. As the Editor of Florida Golf Magazine, I recently
spoke with Keith Kreft, CEO of Never-Search. He gave me an overview
of this extremely cool, computerized travel map program called
Never-Search for Golf.
Never-Search
for Golf is an updateable software map that installs on your
PC and shows the exact location of every golf course, driving
range and retail golf shop in the country. By clicking on any
coded flag appearing on the map, a detailed information profile
of the facility opens, making it extremely easy to find, qualify
and select courses to play in any area being visited. The golf
course information includes everything you’d want to know
about the course to decide whether to play there, including the
number of holes, back tee yardage, greens fees, slope, rating,
address, phone number, whether it has a driving range, course
designer, and if the course has a website, there’s a link
to it, saving hours of Internet searching.
All of the places
appearing on the map are identified by individually recognizable,
coded icons. Even the golf courses have distinctive, color-coded
flags for private, resort, municipal, semiprivate, military,
public and university courses, so you can tell the private courses
from any of the public courses at a glance.
Double click any coded flag to view course details, including
links to websites.
What
makes this program extremely unique from the Internet maps is
a street map of North America is included as part of the installed
program. The initial download/installation loads six million
miles of streets, so once installed, the map can be navigated
without depending upon an Internet connection. As a result, the
program is blazingly fast – it can display all 18,475 US
golf courses on a zoomed out view of the continental US in about
4 seconds. For any of you that have ever tried to find where
more than one golf course is located with relation to where you’re
visiting using the Internet maps, you will absolutely appreciate
what this software can do.
Never-Search for Golf displays combinations of items simultaneously
by checking folders for golf courses, coffee houses, places to
eat, hotels and more.
Another unique
feature over the Internet maps is combinations of places can
be selected to appear on the map simultaneously just by checking
or un-checking folders or subfolders in the Places Folder List.
The map includes other places of interest to travelers such as
airport entrances, lodging, coffee houses and fun places to eat,
so you can quickly find the nearest coffee house along the route
between your hotel and the course you are playing that day. Should
the course you’re playing not have a driving range, and
you’re like me, and need to hit a bucket to warm up, just
click on the driving range folder to find the nearest one, or
view the profiles of other courses along the route. There’s
also a Golf Digest Rating folder, making it easy to see where,
for example, all the 5 or 4.5 star rated courses are located.
Personal locations
can also be added to the map by entering an address and then
labeling it, so you’ll never have to search for these special
places again. These found locations are kept in their own folder
which is independently selectable for display along with the
golf courses, restaurants, etc. For those of you who return to
the same locations regularly, this is an indispensable tool for
keeping track of favorite places to eat, friends in the area,
places you’ve stayed (and what you paid), and locations
of convention centers, receptions, weddings, etc.
If you’ve
ever been fooled by an Internet map showing totally incorrect
course locations, you will appreciate that according to Kreft,
“all of the Never-Search golf course flags mark the entrances
to the courses to within a five iron. It’s incredibly accurate.”
Even with Dustin Johnson’s five-iron, we’re only talking
200 yards. Flags marking course entrances have been verified,
unlike other maps which can place a flag in the center of the
course leaving you to guess where the entrance might be, or even
worse, place the flag in the center of the city, or center of
the zip code when the street address can’t be found. According
to Kreft, nearly 30 percent of the golf course entrances are
mapped inaccurately or are missing from the Internet maps. Trying
to guess where the entrance of the course is by viewing an outline
of the course with a bunch of roads leading into the complex
is not the game, Kreft says, the golfer wanted to play.
Create and save custom golf trails with routing and turn-by-turn
directions.
The program also
has an extraordinary multi-location routing feature. You tag
all the places you want to visit, and select where to start and
finish, and it displays the optimized route along with turn-by-turn
directions. Travel plans with routes can be saved and named as
files just like any other document. What’s amazing is, if
you travel with your laptop, you can open these files en route
to your destination, either on a plane or in a car, and fill
in travel details, adding a restaurant or a coffee house. What
else are you going to do on the plane?
Speaking of which,
the program works with any GPS receiver having a USB connector.
When connected, it shows your location on the map. Kreft flies
with one having a suction cup that he sticks to the window of
the plane. He can look out the window and identify exactly where
he is and what courses or cities he’s flying over. He said
if he would have been on the plane that overshot Minneapolis
by 150 miles last year, it wouldn’t have happened. He would
have notified the flight attendants to check on the pilots!
All the places
appearing on the map are updateable from the company’s website.
The map has an “Update” button which refreshes all
the data. New places which complement the golf experience are
always being added. The included restaurants are primarily comprised
of collections of fun and funky places to eat in a folder titled
“Great Places to Eat Before You Die.” They are collections
of fun and “best” restaurants gathered from a variety
of sources, including every joint visited by Guy Fieri on the
Food Network’s Diners, Drive-ins and Dives TV Show. Other
collections include; Esquire’s Best Sandwiches in America,
PBS’s Sandwiches That You Will Like, Bon Appetit’s
Best Top American Restaurants, GQ’s 20 Hamburgers You Must
Eat Before You Die, Today Show’s Top 5 Sandwiches in America,
Andrew Harper’s 10 Places to Eat Before You Die, and more,
including Kreft’s personal favorites and restaurants recommended
to him by friends and map customers which are worthy of inclusion.
The information details include
“What’s
special” about the place, in other words, what to order.
Rather than showing every restaurant in an area you’re visiting,
and may not return to, and reading endless comments and ratings
by readers, wouldn’t you just rather see where the special
places are? In San Jose, there’s a restaurant called Tony
Dimaggio’s run by a second cousin to Joe Dimaggio. Kreft
writes, “Don’t even think about ordering anything but
a Stromboli. Medium serves one, large serves two. If you make
the mistake of ordering a large for just yourself, don’t
worry, you’ll probably finish it.”
By the way, the
program also has a feature that allows you to mark every course
you’ve played or want to play (your bucket list). For you
traveling golfers wanting to play a course in every state, this
is the perfect tool to view your accomplishments.
The Never-Search
program costs $39.95 and is available through the www.never-search.com
website. It can either be downloaded from the website or installed
from a DVD, and it includes one year of course updates. Florida Golf Magazine
readers can also receive a 10% discount by entering “FloridaGolfMag” as a Promo Code.
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