Simon Willison’s Weblog

What are the best events search engines?

13th January 2012

My answer to What are the best events search engines? on Quora

Since I co-founded one I’m certainly not qualified to express an opinion on which ones are best, but here are a few of my favourites:

http://plancast.com/—Plancast focuses on showing you events your friends are planning to attend, but as a result also has a big corpus of events data that you can search through. They also automatically pull in events their users have signed up for on other services (such as EventBrite and Facebook), which further increases the size of their index. http://songkick.com/—Songkick focuses exclusively on gigs and concerts, and does a fantastic job of aggregating them (I believe they have the most comprehensive database of gigs). You can also sign in and “track” your favourite artists at which point Songkick will alert you when they are playing in a town near you. http://eventful.com/—Eventful is an events aggregator. They’ve been running for years, and do a very good job of pulling in concerts, festivals, theatre listings, family events and so forth. http://lanyrd.com/—this is our site! We’re a crowdsourced conference and professional events directory. We don’t cover gigs/parties/etc but we have a growing index of conferences and evening meetups, especially for tech and related industries. Here’s an example search for upcoming social media events in the UK http://lanyrd.com/search/?contex...