Find Stuff in your area

I like the Tech review of Stephen.H. Wilsdstrom in Businessweek and pretty much read it without failure. A few weeks ago, he wrote about the difficulty in finding businesses located in a zip code (Where Search Stumbles)
Yesterday, my brother asked me the same and I referred him to Ask.com (which came close to what Wilsdstrom wanted) but he wasn't satisfied. He went on his quest to find what he wanted. Voila! he found it . It is not one of the top search engines, but www.mapquest.com. Type in the address & hit search. Once you have the map of the area, you could either search by name of the business or by Category. Let us say you want to know all grocery stores in the address you typed, select Grocery stores from the drop down list box and hit search. It will return you a map and on the right with a list of all Grocery stores with Address, phone etc.