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Goby.com tries to respond to "There's nothing to do!"

Posted 11:00AM 10/22/09 Technology, Travel, Family Money
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Goby.comI can still hear myself at the age of 10, whining "There's nothing to DO!" The designers of the new web site Goby.com must have had the same experience, and created this tool for just that purpose. Unfortunately, like many fledgling sites, it isn't ready for prime time yet.

Goby.com's search feature is pleasingly simple. It asks three questions: what (do you want to do) where (do you want to do it) and when. The first field, what, has a drop down menu for categories including places to go, food and drink, events, fall fun, places to stay, family fun, etc. With a few clicks, I found out that
  • Mute Math is playing in Columbus, Ohio, this weekend
  • I can get a room at the Holiday Inn in Marietta, Ohio, for $86
  • There is a playground in Klein Park in Las Cruces, N.M.
  • The American Museum of Radio and Electricity in Bellingham, Wash., is $2 per person
  • A ghost tour in Tuscon, Ariz.,. apparently is taking place at Voyager RV Park, which claims a "special feeling of a real community, wonderful friends, neighbors, and the endless array of things to do and places to go..." but few ghosts.
That illustrates a growing problem with task-specific sites such as this, which, when you ask your question, query and compile information from a host of sites and format it to fit the space. The quality of its information is no better than that of the sites it queries, such as Spafinder.com, Jambase.com, Golflink.com or Thinkrentals.com. These sites may in turn query yet further sites for their information, and like the children's game of telephone, by the time the information gets to you, errors may have been repeated or even compounded many times.

Goby.com takes the admirable approach of trying to be something to somebody rather than all things to everyone, but for anyone who knows how to used Google' s advanced search function (it's easy, folks) this site doesn't provide enough added value to add it in my list of favorites.

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