Venere

www.venere.com is an excellent source for finding great hotels in lots of places. I used it when I was looking for hotels in Italy. You can read descriptions, look at pictures and they even have maps and descriptions of where the hotel is located. You can search and specify which section of the city you want to stay in, that you want a private bath and how many people per room. Then you can peruse the results and even categorize based on price or star quality. I have more recently used search engines like hostelbooker and things like that because hostels are just plain cheaper than staying in hotels, though I still use Venere when looking for hotels in Europe because it’s especially important to know where the hotel REALLY is and to search by regions inside the cities.