Another Search Startup Gets Funding...
But won't say how much. "It's in the mid-single-digit millions," according to Goby CEO Mark Watkins -- split equally between Flybridge Capital Partners and Kepha Partners -- but "we don't want to help our competitors." It's not clear which competitors Watkins is worried about. Goby has a travel search engine that lets you find places you might want to go based on filling in any two out of three boxes -- what, where and when. Its pretty interface is backed by some hefty database technology developed by Mike Stonebraker, now an adjunct professor at MIT. Stonebraker developed the Ingres and Postgres relational database systems while he was a professor at Berkeley and has been involved in eight other database companies. "Goby is a search engine for the structure of data rather than the text," Watkins said. "Instead of crawling the Web looking at random Web pages, we look for databases of information -- is there a form, how is the browse tree configured? It tells us what the pages are about."
