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MHT's Galen Moore: New 'hyperlocal' web trend
Map of New England mapping companies
Mark Watkins and Michael Stonebraker are building a search engine – but they’re not taking on Google, Watkins said. That, said the former head of R&D for Endeca, would be like “talking to the dial tone.”
Goby Technologies Inc., a travel & entertainment search engine launched today, will keep to its niche, he said. “You can think of it as Google for your free time.”
Watkins conceived a travel search site a few years ago, after returning from a vacation to Hawaii and learning he’d missed a Jack Johnson concert 15 minutes away from his hotel. Chip Hazard at Flybridge Capital Partners, now an investor in the company, introduced Watkins to Stonebraker, the database wizard and serial entrepreneur who helped create the first relational database, Postgres, at the University of California, Berkeley.
With an undisclosed initial investment from Flybridge and Waltham-based Kepha Partners, Goby – which originally launched as Byledge - now has 10 employees and headquarters in Boston’s Financial District. Watkins said the company has no plans to bulk up its presence but will instead focus on product development and iteration in response to customer demand.
Stonebraker and Watkins had never worked on consumer technology before but applied some ideas Stonebraker had about web search to Watkins’ travel problem. The result is a search engine that mines content from deep inside travel and information websites and understands it based on the path taken to discover it.
“You can learn a lot about content by how you find it,” Watkins said. “The browse path through a website will tell you a lot about what you’re looking at.”
That context will allow Goby to limit searches by date, location, music genre and more – a list of readymade topics that users can pick from to find out what is going on in a given geography at a given time. Categories include ‘outdoor recreation,’ ‘entertainment and nightlife,’ ‘restaurants,’ or ‘classes and instruction.’
The system appears to search a limited number of third-party sites for each query — sometimes yielding results that sometimes come from a wide collection of sources, other times yielding a list from all the same source. Either way, the aggregation on a friendly user interface is helpful.
But it didn’t seem able to filter very effectively by date. A search of upcoming Boston entertainment & nightlife turns up an American Repertory production of Trojan Barbie that closed this April. A search of upcoming Chicago nightlife turned up Lollapalooza, which was over in August.
Watkins said date awareness is a function the company will be refining. Sometimes bad dates come from erroneous information on third-party websites, he said — an issue the company is considering tackling by cross-checking.
The site’s categorical structure makes it easy to obtain a straightforward list from a mainstream category. Lists of Boston Harbor cruises appeared pretty exhaustive, as did the page for zoos and aquariums. But getting more specific proved difficult.
What if a traveler wanted to find an Italian gourmet shop to buy cold cuts for a waterfront picnic? A search of Boston delis for the word ‘gourmet’ turns up Subway sandwiches as the top hit. Searching Italian restaurants for ‘takeout,’ ‘deli,’ or ‘salumeria,’ didn’t get any closer.
Likewise went efforts to find taco trucks in Los Angeles. Searching all Mexican restaurants in L.A., the top result was Taco Bell. Refining the list by the keyword, “truck,” left only one grousing review of an organic taco place in Valley Village — in which the grumpy reviewer mentions that he usually prefers tacos from a truck.
All the top results for restaurants came from local.yahoo.com, which could be part of the problem. Watkins said Goby also draws dining results from Yelp, Opentable and a few small, regional sources. They are continuing to add sources over time, he said, and the company is open to suggestions.
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