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August 17, 2009
Hunch Quickly Does Away With Spotlight Search in Favor of More Standard Results Page
Hunch has been around for a couple of months and is already doing away with their original search format. Instead of a menu popping up to help you search, now you just type and submit. Then, a list of results pop up. Hey that sounds familiar.
To be fair, the results are still different. They're links to answers, all of which are hosted on Hunch, which after all is the *other* decision engine.
I tested out the new update with "tennis." But why does a result for sports underwear pop up?
Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 17, 2009 4:32 PM
Comments
saw this coming.
With their old format, you would have to go through as many as 20 questions before getting your search results. In that same time frame, you could probably conduct a dozen searches on Google, Yahoo or Bing.
They've still got problems though. With the new format, they've switched it up and give you a set of instant results.... BUT... instead of sending you to the actual page of the result you click on, you're sent to a hunch hosted page for that site. Then they make it hard to find the actual link to that site from the hosted page, by making the image/logo a link to a larger image. The only way to get to the page you want is by clicking on the small, obscure "more" link.
Still Failing
simon August 17, 2009 5:49 PM
Hi, this is Kelly Ford from Hunch. Just wanted to clarify a few things regarding the observations above:
* Hunch isn't a search engine; it's a site to help you make decisions. If you simply want a list of relevant links to external sites, then by all means you should start with an actual search engine such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing.
* Our search box was built to return an internal site search within Hunch, not an external web search.
* Our new site search is a work in progress and is still being refined (see our blog post about this here: http://blog.hunch.com/?p=5214)
* Our site search results page shows Hunch topics in which your search term appears, sorted by popularity, as well as the top three decision results for you within each of those topics (if you are logged in) and the most popular (if you are not logged in).
* Regarding the underwear result, we agree that's a little funky and we had actually fixed it yesterday. A Hunch contributor had tagged the 'athletic apparel' topic with the keyword 'tennis', and since the sport underwear is the most popular result in that topic, it showed up for your tennis search.
* Our search algorithm will learn over time which results users click on most often, so it will improve as more people use it.
thanks
Kelly Ford
Kelly Ford August 18, 2009 4:07 PM
