Boston-based social shopping site Gopher Ideas just launched to the public out of private alpha today — and just in time for your holiday shopping.

The site allows you to find great gifts — and fast — by leveraging crowdsourcing to bubble the best products to the top and intuitively categorize them by occasion, interest, and who they’re best suited for. The company’s proprietary content management system enables this all to happen, allowing user-generated categorization as well as the ability to vote up and down that categorization so it remains accurate.

Gopher Ideas is currently bootstrapped and founder Jamie Alders, an MBA candidate at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, tells BostInno they will seek funding in spring 2011 after their Beta has gained more traction.

The site is simple to use for anyone: search and browse great gifts, share your own neat gift ideas with the community, and even make wish lists to keep sane with all your holiday shopping with their drag-and-drop technology. Simplicity and ease of use were two factors Gopher Ideas focused on in iterating the product from its alpha release to beta (private alpha was launched in June 2010 to 100 users). “When recommending a gift, users pull descriptions, prices, and images directly from online stores like Amazon.com, WalMart.com, BestBuy.com, and many more including specialty retailers like RedEnvelope for personalized gifts and Cloud9Living for experience gifts,” Alders explained.

I had a chance to play around with Gopher Ideas this morning, and was impressed by its interface and amount of activity on the site. The site also boasts a nice selection of neat products already in its early days, like this beer holster (which I found browsing through products perfect for brothers) and this electric mulcher (which I found browsing products under gardening). I was also able to add some of my own gift ideas to the platform in only a matter of a minute or two.

The new beta product also includes game mechanics, whereby users can rate gift ideas by voting “yes” or “no” to matches between gift ideas and occasions, people, and interests. This game again helps ensure the categorization and tagging is kept clean.

Gopher Ideas was founded by Jamie Alders and Prashant Juvekar, and they plan to monetize by creating a business model around lead generation. “We create value by connecting visitors with great gift ideas and retailers where those gifts can be purchased, and retailers pay us for the leads we provide,” Alders told BostInno. “As we grow and evolve, we expect our business model to evolve as well.”

Alders is currently a MBA candidate at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and was previously the Lead Design Engineer at Bose Corporation. Juvekar is a 15 year veteran of the high-tech industry, working at startups and Fortune 500 companies alike, and a recent graduate from Babson College’s M.B.A program.