This is a big question. Consider the following when you’re looking for a breed.

• Do you or anybody else interacting with the dog have a dog allergy? Could you try to find it out? If yes, search for dogs that are more hypoallergenic. This will greatly limit your options.
• Will the dog be interacting with a lot of other dogs? Does it need to play well with others?
• Will the dog be interacting with small kids?
• Will the dog need to be a service dog? Ours is not, but we can only imagine there are guidelines about this out there.
• I assume you’re here because you also have limited space, probably in a higher resident-density building. Smaller to medium dogs (< 50lb) might be better, though, of course, this depends on your situation. We realized smaller dog means less food (cost). Does your dog need to have lower tendency to have separation anxiety? You don’t want your neighbor to complain about your dog barking all the time when you’re not around. Related to separation anxiety, how long are you usually away for work? Ideally, a dog shouldn’t be left alone for more than 4 hours at a time when it’s not sleeping overnight, so if you can, get a trusted family or friend to let it out of the crate to break the absence out.
• How much activity can you give your dog? If you don’t have a yard for the dog to run around in like us, you might need to walk your dog a lot. Can you commit to this? That being said, we looked for a dog with reasonable but not too demanding in terms of physical activity.
• Do you live where the temperature goes really hot or really cold?
• How important is it that the dog be easily trained to behave?

After thinking about the above questions, a website we went to was dogtime. There we can see breeds we’re interested in before and see the general profile of the breed. This should be a fun but responsible part of the process.

Once you narrow down to a breed or a couple of them, you can ask yourself whether you can find these breeds in shelters, or whether you should go to a breeder. Search for websites of shelters near you and they’ll usually have a page where you can see the list of available dogs. You’ll get a sense whether you can get your dog from a shelter or a breeder. More about finding our dog on this page.