Why Yahoo Acquired Upcoming.org

When I read this morning that Yahoo acquired upcoming.org I wasn't that surprised. Why would a search company acquire an events database? I think its pretty obvious that event search currently sucks!

I discovered this a few weeks ago when I wanted to plan a weekend with my girlfriend in either boston, nyc, or toronto - my decision would be based on whats going on in each city that weekend. But it's really hard to find out whats going on in each city. Every city web site has an event search that is equally difficult to use.

After this experience I realized that there is a lot of room for improvement for event search. Look at how indeed simplified job search with two boxes, what and where - the same could be done for event search.

I want to be able to search for events naturally with queries like nyc this weekend, etc. Since upcoming.org has an API, I was actually able to build a proof of concept event search that supports such queries. My example only works on a few cities, but I think Yahoo! could easily do what I did (it only took me an hour or two to put that together).