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June 15, 2009
Hunch Launches New "Decision Engine"
Microsoft's Bing isn't the only "decision engine" in town anymore, with today's launch of Hunch. Hunch is a new site that aims to connect people based on their answers to several questions, from "Where is your house located?" to "Do you like bumper cars?"
As users answer questions, hunch learns more about them. The service then helps the user make decisions, such as where to go on vacation, or what kind of car to buy, by asking a series of related questions and comparing those answers to similar users' answers and the user's past answers on Hunch.
Hunch will become smarter both as more people use it, and as an individual uses it more.
According to the site's Fact Sheet:
Our long-term goal is for a user to be able to come to Hunch with any decision she is pondering, and after answering a handful of questions, get as good a decision as if she had interviewed a group of knowledgeable people or done hours of careful research online.
Eventually, when Hunch gets good enough, we hope users will trust it to make an informed decision without having to turn to lots of external time-consuming sources of information.
The site has been in invite-only beta since March, but opens to the public this week. Its 10-person team includes several MIT computer scientists and Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, who is a Hunch co-founder and chief product officer.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb on June 15, 2009 10:15 AM
Comments
Charles June 15, 2009 3:23 PM
Hunch is a pain. It is annoying and takes too long to get me the information I am looking for. Plus the first few results are not relevant to what I was looking for.
MJ June 15, 2009 7:23 PM
I think Hunch is pretty cool. I've been using it during the beta and I think it has a good success rate predicting the decisions I would have made anyway. The API is a really neat idea and may be their best contribution in the end.
My only issue is that once again it is a national/global destination site and really not organized around the community of people whose opinions and ideas I'm most likely to want and trust.
I'd prefer to go to a local site and ask questions in a less structured way and see what they have to say. For example http://questionland.thestranger.com is for people who read The Stranger in Seattle and Questionland should be available to all cities with alternative weeklies/sites after the upcoming AAN conference.