Bing.com recently re-released the Live.com search engine under a new name and with a new purpose. Rather than have bing just be another search engine, Microsoft intentionally branded bing as a “decision engine”, claiming the the search results will be more relevant to the searcher by cutting the clutter and solving the query. Bing’s follow through on their decision engine claims is mediocre, but I suppose thay are mostly deserving of the title. If their were a king (or queen) of decision engines, hunch.com would definitely deserve the title.
Hunch.com launched within the last week with much fanfare and anticipation mainly because of the involvement of co-founder Caterina Fake’s (co-founder of flickr) involvement. Along with Caterina, hunch.com claims three other co-founders with most of the rest of the staff claiming common backgrounds in education at MIT and employment at SiteAdvisor.
Hunch is like a mashup of Yahoo! Answers and a mega-8ball. Hunch asks users a string of about 20 questions when they reach the hunch homepage and then offer suggestions on search queries after the string is complete. When a query is made, a few more questions are asked regarding personal preferences – and based on the input hunch spits back 5 answers/solutions to your question.
The big question that looms over websites like hunch.com is “Why Use Them?”. Well, if you are in a hurry and don’t mind taking a stab at the first page of google or yahoo’s results being what you need – then you shouldn’t need to use hunch. However, if you have an extra 30 seconds on your hands then spending the time at hunch to get a better targeted result is well worth it.
While we are all “hunching”, I have this hunch that you really enjoy what you are reading here and want to stay updated by subscribing to my RSS feed. So, you should. You can get it via RSS to your favorite reader or delivered into your email – it is up to you.
Have a hunch about this post, or any others, or perhaps a positive hunch experience to share? Shout it out below via comment. You never know what you could get in return.
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Excellent article i’m sure that i will come back here again
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