Goby is a search engine that's all about exploring new things to do with your free time, from a weekend adventure to the vacation of a lifetime. Goby can introduce you to exciting new things to do, or help you find new places to try old favorites. Bottom line: we want to help you have fun.

GO-be.

The simple answer: we had no choice. We're experience junkies. It's a compulsion for which we stubbornly refuse treatment. We'd rather be kayaking or something. So Goby was created to make it as easy as possible to research and plan everyday adventures and free-time activities. Our main goal is to eliminate the need to hop around to lots of different websites and wade through information that's often incomplete, irrelevant or hard to find. (Also, truth be told, we're total technology geeks and love to build stuff for the sake of building it.)

Well...everyone. Whether you're looking for the perfect bed & breakfast for a romantic getaway, a new hiking trail to tackle, a cool museum to visit with the kids, or a live show to check out this weekend, create your next adventure with Goby! Basically, we're for anyone who wants to have fun. And since fun means different things to different people, we include as many activities as we possibly can.

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.

You asked for it...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.

Goby was co-founded by Mark Watkins and Vince Russo from Endeca and Lycos, respectively, and noted tech entrepreneur and MIT professor Mike Stonebraker. Want more? Click on their names.

Goby has received venture funding from both Flybridge Venture Capital and Kepha Partners.

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.

We are totally into working with like-minded folks, and we partner with other brands and websites to recreate the Goby experience on their sites. Just shoot John Walsh an e-mail at partners@goby.com. He's in charge of that kind of stuff

No problem, please send an e-mail to press@goby.com or call David Cumpston at (415) 277-4917 and we'll take care of you right away.

Did you ever have the experience of being somewhere, then coming home & finding out about some cool thing you missed while you were there? OMG, us too. Once, Mark was in Hawaii and missed a Jack Johnson show just down the street from where he was staying. Jack Johnson in Hawaii! $%&@#! When he's not busy being a search geek, Mark likes to hike & travel & listen to music and...Much like the rest of us at Goby. It turns out that Vince & Mike had similar frustrations too and that's why they all decided to invent Goby. The official version involves more money, more people, and more pizza, but you get the drift. We were frustrated with the inability to easily find this kind of targeted information, and thought we could do something better.

Geez, way to put us on the spot. 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@goby.com and we'll consider it.

Glad you asked...YES! Just look for the link labeled "share on facebook" on each result for a quick way to share what you found on Goby. All you have to do is login with your Facebook information. It's too easy.

Good question. We do have a process for qualifying and introducing high-quality sites. Drop us a note at content@goby.com and we'll take a look. If it's not a site we've already found and we end up using it, we'll drop you a Goby t-shirt with one of our autographs! (T-shirts feature breathable high quality cotton, and an adorable fish logo.)