Ask HN: Why is local event search so bad?

[dcraw]

Trying to find events (block parties, concerts, carnivals, festivals, etc) always seems horrible online. Google and Facebook both have very limited options, and the quality of the data seems horrible. Has anyone worked on this problem and know why it's relatively unsolved? My best guess is that the limited time of the events makes it so that the amount of revenue possible per event sourced is low. Still, it seems like a reasonable revenue stream for one of the big tech companies and I'm curious why it seems underinvested in.

[MattGaiser]

I recently participated in a hackathon where a whole bunch of people tried to solve this and failed pretty horribly. Granted, this was a weekend event, but I wouldn't say that any of the ideas made any progress at solving the problem.

Granted, this is not a professional attack on the problem, but there were a few VCs in the crowd and they were stunned at how nobody found any real new ideas to attack it at all and when asked about that, it revolved around data quality and data timeliness.

Data timeliness is a problem nobody seems to have solved. I keep seeing LinkedIn posts and FB posts and tweets that have dates in them and thus are no longer relevant as the deadline has passed, or will get the old version of something to come up on Google first.

[hindsightbias]

Old media was centralized, so every event holder knew where to send their info. It was curated by professionals.

New media, like Hoodline, breathlessly report on what you missed last week but will never pay a human to actually assemble a future events list.