

Start-up idea: Why event search needs to be fixed - mrbhandari
http://rbhandari.com/2012/05/22/start-up-idea-fix-event-search/

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anigbrowl
So true. Google Calendar should rule this space, and it drives me nuts that
deciding to attend an event usually involves multiple rounds of
copying/pasting and manual editing when the amount of data involved is so
trivial and well-specified.

On a broader level, there's a huge disruptive opportunity for a time-based
search engine. _When_ things happen is often very, very important, but
gathering, collating, and connecting this information is painfully difficult.
Take a simple example: Federal Reserve Board meetings. There are of tremendous
importance to economic analysts, and worth knowing about for any politically
aware person. Here is the calendar page:
[http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars.h...](http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars.htm)
There isn't even an RSS feed. On a more general level, there isn't any obvious
tool for browsing recurring events to look at their periodicity. To stick with
the economic context (because it's one that matters rather a lot), consider
the quarterly earnings and filings of public companies. As someone who likes
DSP, it's perplexing to me that I can't add and subtract periodic data about
companies' year-on-year performance as I would other sorts of periodic signal
to explore the contributing factors.

I thought that this is where Google Trends/insights for search would go. Look
at this search:
[http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=toys%2C%20mattel%2C...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=toys%2C%20mattel%2C%20hasbro&cmpt=q)
You can see a big spike in searches for 'toys' at the end of every year, which
is obviously related to Christmas. You would think that with so much lovely
cyclical data, the obvious thing to do would be treat it as a signal, but no.

At first blush, events and trends seem like two different and unrelated
things, but it's a fact that almost the entire human race uses the same
calendar and clock system, so that both one-off and recurring temporal data
both involve fairly straightforward cardinality problems. IT _infuriates_ me
that I can search out particular word combinations from billions of documents
and get results within a few seconds, but that trying to locate things in time
feels like it has hardly advanced at all in over a decade.

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mrbhandari
Completely agree with you that there's an opportunity for a time based search
engine and maybe some standardization so that events can be read by that
search engine.

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tferris
Already done: Just go to <http://www.wherevent.com/> and check your city.

Simple idea but very powerful—you don't need more. They have to put on some
filters and integrate some more streams (ie. meetup.com) and then it's
perfect.

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AznHisoka
"Large market There are 11M searches per month for events in Google in the US
alone (25M worldwide)"

Just because there's 11m searches doesn't mean Google will give you those 11m
searchers.

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mrbhandari
Yes, completely agree. But I just use this as an indication of the number of
people in search of something as opposed to say that if you create it you'll
be #1 ranked for each event. Many people will go directly to ticketmaster or
meetup as well - those people are part of the market.

