Golden Gate Bridge. Photo by Mike Johnston on Flickr
Organizing free time is sometimes a hard task. You might be willing to spend a nice week-end with your children or to do something special for your wedding anniversary not really knowing where to start from. Your friends are relying on you to organise an adventure trip and you’re looking for a way to surprise them. And what if you’re looking for a romantic escape with your girlfriend but don’t know hot to find the right place?
Goby is a new search engine that provides you with information and ideas on any kind of leisure activities throughout the US. The reasearch is extremely simple: you just need to choose what you’d like to do, where and when and Goby displays a good amount of suggestions according to your search criteria.
Quanzhou Marionette Theater. James Estrin/The New York Times
Sports lovers can discover new places for hiking and mountain bike trails, climbing, kayaking and canoeing. Food and wine cultivators can find a great choice of proposals, and there are lots of suggestions also for art, music and theatre passionate. Once completed your first search, you’ll see that Goby functionality goes further, providing information on what’s nearby: hotels, restaurants, bars, museums, and lots more. This is a precious tool especially when you have little time, and being able to organize your trip having all the things that interest you nearby is a great advantage.
Camping at Yosemite National Park. Photo Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Goby’s search engine is a good tool, especially if you are trying to get a first idea of possible activities and locations. It has however in my opinion a limit which prevents Goby to fully offer its visitors what they are looking for (and probably also what they would like to offer). When you open a link to gather more information you would expect to be simply and quickly directed to the original website. This is not the case, and very often you jump from one search engine to another one. I guess this responds to commercial purposes, but indeed it is limiting the visitor experience. When things get tortuous and complicated people usually give up…
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