Goby (pronounced GO-be) today unveiled its one-of-a-kind search engine that helps people find fun new ways to spend their free time.

Using proprietary technology developed by researchers at MIT, Goby searches across hundreds of prequalified Web sites to provide users access to information on millions of attractions, activities, events, restaurants and places to stay across the United States. Whether you’re looking for a fresh hiking trail, a cool new museum, a romantic bed and breakfast or a live show this weekend, Goby surfaces the best results that the Web has to offer, presented in a format that’s well organized and easy to use.

Goby poses three questions: What, Where and When. By answering just two of these in any combination, users instantly receive an easy-to-read results page that includes not only detailed information about attractions, activities, locations and events, but also an interactive map and photos from sites like Google and Flickr.

“Our mission at Goby is to allow users to spend less time searching and more time doing the things they want to do,” said Mark Watkins, co-founder and CEO of Goby. “Goby enables you to turn ordinary weekends or weeklong getaways into something memorable or extraordinary, by eliminating the need to hop around from site to site and wade through information that’s often incomplete or irrelevant.”

In a recent study conducted online by Harris Interactive on behalf of Goby, 71 percent of U.S. adults who are online admitted to being frustrated by the irrelevant results that most search engines return. Goby will alleviate those frustrations by exploring the depths of the Web to find the most relevant and richest sources of information and present it in an easy-to-understand format, rather than serving up pages of sites that happen to contain a few keywords but don’t actually meet the needs being addressed.

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Goby is a search engine focused on exploring new things to do with your free time, from taking a unique vacation to creating this weekend’s adventure. Rather than hopping from site to site, trying to make sense of it all, you simply tell Goby What, Where and When and we surface the best results the Web has to offer, organized in a way that’s easy to understand and use. Launched in 2009 and based in Boston, Goby is a privately held company whose investors include Flybridge Capital Partners and Kepha Partners.

Goby is a search engine focused on exploring fun things to do with your free time, from taking a unique vacation to creating this weekend’s adventure.

Our two main goals are:

*Help to solve frustrations involved in planning free-time activities.

With Goby you do one search, specifying what you want to do, where and when to find what you need about a desired trip or leisure activity, rather than hopping around from Web site to Web site and sorting through pages and links to often irrelevant info.

*Provide a superior search experience

Goby explores the depths of the Web to access the richest sources of hard-to-find information for your free time activities. The results are organized in a way that’s easy to understand and use, rather than serving up page after page of Web sites that just happen to contain your key words.

Bottom line: we want to help you have fun.

How do you pronounce it? GO-be.

Where does the information come from?

Goby uses something called “deep Web” technology to search carefully selected databases and other sources of information that are pre-qualified for relevance. Then Goby organizes your query results in a meaningful way instead of spitting back a series of web pages that happen to contain your key words. By using deep Web technology, Goby happily explores an ocean of information and brings you back all the good stuff you’re looking for – but only the good stuff.

Okay, now give me the technical stuff!

Goby supports exploratory search in a way that no traditional search engine can. We create a rich information model that provides semantic organization and lends structure to unstructured data. We can search, sort, filter, map, and contextualize heterogeneous web data. (That’s right; we said it – contextualize heterogeneous web data.) Instead of just giving you a list of Web pages, we convert all those pages into human-friendly information, so you can see things like locations, phone numbers, photographs from around the Web, links to nearby points of interest, and so on – pretty much any information that might help you plan your adventure.

Who’s behind Goby?

Goby was co-founded by Mark Watkins and Vince Russo from Endeca and Lycos, respectively, and noted tech entrepreneur and MIT professor Mike Stonebraker.

How does Goby make money?

Goby is a search engine, albeit an entirely new one, and we make money the way most search engines do. We sell ad space on the site (see the sidebar stuff on our results pages), and we will always clearly mark it as such. Also, some sites pay us if you click through to their site and buy something, but of course, there’s no pressure. Just know that your decisions directly impact whether we drink imported or domestic on Friday afternoons.

Can I work at Goby?

Let’s see…do you have an odd sense of humor? Are you wicked smaht? (OK, we’re from Boston and not above a cheap laugh.) Can you imagine a job you don’t think of as a job, even when you’re working way too many hours? Will you help us stress test a new business model we’re developing in which new employees pay us? We’re kidding about that last line. Send an e-mail to jobs (at) goby (dot) com.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 8:18 am and is filed under Newcomers, Travel, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.