Need help planning the weekend?  Go to goby.com.  I just came across this great new search engine that is designed to help people plan their free time.  According to the site it has 2 missions  - providing a superior search experience and help to solve frustrations involved in planning free-time activities.

According to its FAQ section it does this by creating a rich information model that provides semantic organization and lends structure to unstructured data. It searches, sorts, filters, maps, and contextualizes heterogeneous web data.  “Contextualizing heterogeneous web data” – that’s right!!

Now whenever a new search engine comes around I (like most people) tend to play around with it briefly and then usually go back to my habit of using my favorite search engine.  It’s a habit that’s hard to break.  Passive loyalty or inertia as the loyalty marketing folks would call it.  Goby however has a better chance of breaking that habit.  That’s not because of the contextualization of heterogeneous web data, it’s because it really really works!

It asks 3 simple questions : what do you want to do, where and when.  Here’s an example.  I have a friend in town from Europe this weekend who likes indie music so I typed in indie music, Brooklyn, tomorrow.  I got back a perfectly clean list of indie music concerts in Brooklyn.  When I try that on Google I usually get a whole range of search results I need to sort through in order to cobble together a simple list like the one I got back from Goby.

I could of course have easily looked at TimeOut for a list of indie concerts in Brooklyn.  So I tried something a bit more difficult.  How about giving my friend  more of an American experience this weekend?  I typed in Bluegrass, Brooklyn and tomorrow.  Once again I got back a clean list of bluegrass only shows for tomorrow in Brooklyn.  Great! 

Something completely different – learning how to make pumpkin pie (something I had never had before I moved to the US – now I love it).  I typed in pumpkin pie, nyc, tomorrow.  It actually gave me one search return for a pumpkin pie making class in NYC!  I typed in the same words in google and got back 107,000 results but couldn’t see a single pie baking class on the 1^st page.  I typed in “pumpkin pie baking nyc” –  878,000 results, no luck on the 1^st page.  “pumpkin pie baking class nyc” – 838,000 results, again no luck on the 1^st page in the organic search, luckily the Institute of Culinary Education in NY had bought the search term so they had a class under the sponsored links.

If you are looking for something to do in your spare time, Goby is far more efficient than Google.  It returns a much smaller set of highly relevant results.  This creates a far better experience.  Less is more.  This is something we know is true in the physical world.  Having too much choice can be exhausting as this interesting recent behavioral experiment showed for example.  The same holds true for search.  I think I will continue to use Goby in the future.