OK. Sometimes the internet sucks. More specifically, searching for venues on the internet sucks.

First of all, you have your big-hitters. The guys that always come up at the top of the search engines. These sites largely function like white pages but with more features. I gave them a shot first, because they were right there.

The worst site by far was the Gathering Guide. I searched for wedding reception venues within 50 miles of Santa Cruz, CA, and the first several hits on the page were located in San Ramon, Los Gatos, Fremont, San Francisco, San Diego, Atascadero, Livermore, Menlo Park, and Beverly Hills. Please tell me what the hell kind of sense this makes. Adjusting the distance yielded arbitrary results. The first hit when I searched within 25 miles of Santa Cruz was in Half Moon Bay; the first hit when I searched within 10 miles was Pala. Just for the record, neither of those is located inside the specified distances.

Maybe wedding planning just drains my IQ points, but it took me a while of playing around with the results to figure out that the first dozen or so hits on each page must be paid placements. It was only after I clicked on a half-hidden Santa Cruz link at the very bottom of the page that they showed me actual venues located nearby—again, hidden far beneath the paid placements. And none of these venues that were actually anywhere near Santa Cruz had pictures of the site, and most lacked full information. Totally useless.

One thing I did like about this website: it’s the only one I’ve seen that lists “location character” (such as elegant, historic, private, traditional, modern, creative, etc.). Fantastic idea! But you can’t search by character. Pathetic execution.

Other search sites fared better. I liked how Here Comes the Guide seems to have plenty of details, and I like how on Wedding Book you can narrow your venue/caterer options by maximum budget—not to mention BYO, outdoor space, venue type, and so on. Yet every time I filter my options, I get a handful of paltry pickings before the list dissolves into venues whose profiles haven’t been completely filled out. If you really want to know more, you have to Google the venue name and look it up for yourself, which leaves you wondering what the *#%@!$ point of using these neat all-in-one search sites is in the *#%@!$ first place.

After I tried the big guns I turned to local and city websites for venue listings, with mixed results. No site is ever going to be totally comprehensive, of course, but it seems like each online resource I try has a shallow depth of return and/or a frustratingly inadequate lack of information. It’s making me want to throw my laptop out the window and run shrieking down the street. Is it just us? Are we facing more search frustrations than other couples because we chose to look outside of the city in which we live? That can’t be right.

Amusingly, the best venue resource we’ve found so far is actually on a catering site. The list is pretty much limited to venues in and around Monterey, but still, we were able to find a few places that we actually want to go see.

And that’s all I want. I want to just go see. Because the internet sure as hell isn’t telling me much.