Goby Search Engine

Goby, a Search Engine Activity

Gets local search right with Goby. Goby is new search engine designed to help you find something to do. Goby (GO-be) is a new search engine that’s all about finding fun ways to spend your free time, from a weekend to a week off. Anyone wanting to plan a day out can look to Goby, a new search engine designed to make it easier for people to find things to do with their free time.

The Goby site searches across hundreds of websites and pulls in thousands of results pointing to local music happenings, activities, museums, sports games, entertainment events and restaurants. Through events databases from big sites like Eventful, Upcoming and Yahoo Local to smaller ones like museum sites, Goby searches hiking guides and hundreds more, combining all the relevant results in one list of search results.

However, the results are impressive, whether applied to your vacation or hometown destination. In fact, Goby’s local search engine is possibly the best we’ve ever used. Whether you’re looking for the perfect bed & breakfast for a romantic getaway, a fresh hiking trail to tackle, a cool new museum to visit with the kids or a live show to check out this weekend, create your next adventure with Goby.

Goby CEO Mark Watkins tells that’s by design. “We’re not trying to take an editorial view that says result A is better than result B,” says Watkins. Rather, Goby’s goal is to “surface up the information so that you can make the most of your free time, based on your own criteria.”

Goby has been available to the public for only a few weeks and it is still working out some kinks. The more people use it, the more accurate its results will become, or at least that’s what its founders hope will happen. When Goby’s search results are accurate, they include the kinds of thing locals would want to see or do in their own hometown, and that’s no small feat. But people won’t have a lot of patience for some of the erroneous results that now show up in Goby.

Of course, Goby isn’t perfect. Aggregating data from numerous sources as Goby does means that your results will have a number of duplicates, the same music event listed on both Upcoming and Eventful will show up twice in Goby’s list. It’s a little annoying. I’d like to see Goby filter and combine duplicates, but it’s not a deal breaker.

WSJ’s Katie Boehret says the site is functional with only a few kinks.