Thank you everyone, yes, this was exactly my point. .
Another one is those sites offer every island and location on the planet, try Antarctica and you get countless hotel booking sites. In fairness to 'Anon' the Chiang Mai results were not bad, but then I checked on MSN and the results came up much much more local information. But my concern is that later in the year booking a trip to the US with family I would like to know a good place to find out what towns have of interest, where to go and what to see etc etc, we want places with charactor and something different? Searching just brings up commercial sites one after another.