There’s a convergence coming, between the worlds of search, travel, local, and social. It used to be that if you were traveling, you used a guidebook and map and talked to the concierge, then you graduated to TripAdvisor and Expedia (and if you were adventurous, Kayak). People’s use of search engines tended not to intersect with their travel planning. In recent years of course Google has become a de facto part of the travel planning experience – although by no means a perfect one. And some search engines have introduced travel products (notably Bing Travel). And for planning your weekend, search engines have historically not been of much use at all – they don’t understand the concept of time or location very well (“this weekend” is just a few keywords to them), and don’t understand your task (when I search for beaches on Cape Cod, why do I get back results for restaurants with the word “beach” in them?). Robert Scoble has some thoughts on this subject, here. Google appears to be moving in this direction, with their rumored acquisition of ITA, which powers many airfare metasearch sites including Kayak. Their abortive attempt to acquire Yelp shows how search & local are converging as well.

But there’s a new game in town – social/local gaming, in particular with things like Foursquare and Gowalla, that combine social gaming with local-search-like results, allowing people to broadcast where they are and what they’re doing. There’s an evolving “stack” of technologies, including location databases and engagement tools, nicely summarized by Chris Dixon. (I disagree with his assertion that location databases will become commoditized – the information is too hard to come by, and companies like InfoUSA make hundreds of millions in revenue providing this kind of data. Not to mention the startups like SimpleGeo and Locationary and for that matter Goby, that are tackling the problem, but I digress).

This kind of engagement is going to have a profound impact on how people plan travel and figure out their weekends. DeepDish Creative (http://deepdishcreative.com/wordpress/2010/02/foursquare-for-tourism/) is talking about how destination marketing organizations can leverage these tools to promote their destination. But I see two problems with this generation of tools as they apply to this problem:

1. They are after-the-fact. I tend to engage with Foursquare after I’m already AT someplace – Foursquare isn’t really involved in my decision process, it simply records what I’ve already decided. As a result, it has limited use (not no use, just limited use) in making decisions.
2. These tools only recognize a limited set of entities, primarily businesses (in fact, primarily restaurants). It’s hard to check in at a U2 concert, because it’s an event, and it’s hard to check in at the Grand Canyon, because it’s not really an entity, it’s a generalized (and off-the-beaten-track) place. God help you if you want to check-in on a hiking trail!

Addressing those last two elements would create a resource that will not only appeal to my vanity & let me broadcast what I’m doing, but more importantly help me decide.

The key need here is a semantically meaningful database of things, to key all your features off of, and search tool to find & organize them – not just a pile of URLs. The system needs to know that Yo La Tengo is a band playing at the Fillmore on the 23rd of April, with a date and a location – not just a pile of keywords without any meaning. Any system like this needs to cover hotels and restaurants as well as non-business entities like hiking trails or concerts, and once you leave hotels/restaurants, this information is hard to come by. Once you have the database of entities, it is straightforward to build a platform for people to engage with their networks, in the context of that content. Once you have a strongly categorized, rich database of things to do, and a strong network of people telling you what they are interested in, you can provide compelling recommendations as well as support discovery. And, strangely enough 8), that’s where we’re headed with Goby – we plan to be right at the intersection of this convergence.

What’s Goby all about anyway? On the surface, Goby is a search engine for things to do in your free time. The travel industry has invested hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars in helping you get a hotel room and plane ticket – but hotels and plane rides aren’t why people travel – they travel for experiences. Finding experiences is tough – the information is scattered around the web, locked away in domain-specific databases, and often with poor user experiences and bad information architecture. And we’ve all had the experience of sitting around on a Friday night trying to decide what to do over the weekend – essentially the same problem. Goby crawls the web looking for high quality sources of information about all kinds of experiences, covering both traditional travel content (tours, attractions, lodging) as well as more local-oriented things to do (like music, theater, restaurants, museums, hiking trails, surfing spots and skiing…). We then take those results and contextualize them, by geolocating the results and putting them on a map, cross-referencing photography from around the web, and converting those web pages we found into real-world objects you can make decisions about.

Under the covers, Goby is a structured data, task-centric search engine. Over the years there has been continuous interest in the tech & business communities around “what is the next Google?”. In my view there won’t be a “next Google” in search, if by that one means a market-dominating, universally applicable search engine. The future of search is task-centric information access, that supports both findability and exploration in the context of specific objectives – say, finding a new book to read, deciding what neighborhood to move to, getting your next job or deciding where to eat. The shortcoming of major search engines is that, while they can happily parse your query and give you some web pages to read, they have no idea what you are trying to accomplish – and therefore cannot adapt their experience to support your task. You can see this trend happening with Goby (search engine for your free time), and with other interesting products like Milo (product search will real-time store inventory), and the very interesting Hunch ( a general purpose recommendation/decision engine).

The other major dimension to how people consume information is through social media – tools that integrate search & social media have the opportunity to bring the engagement of social media to the findability of search. Look for more on this from Goby in the future.