The “Search Wars” have spurned new ideas as to how answers are provided.  Unlike the way a Google search uses keywords to provide relevant links to information that may answer your question, a new site, Hunch, plans to answer your questions by asking you more questions.

Caterina Fake (yes Fake is her real last name) made her mark in the online world as co-founder of Flickr.  After Fake sold Flickr to Yahoo in 2005, she helped Yahoo develop Yahoo Answers, a site that allows users to post questions on any subject; fellow users that might know the answer then are able to reply to questions hopefully finding a solution.  Her work at Yahoo gave her the idea to start Hunch which allows you to ask a questions such as, “What shoes should I buy?” or “What magazine should I subscribe to?”, Hunch then asks you a series of 5-10 questions in order to narrow the results to ultimately give an answer to your question.

On your first visit to Hunch, its tag line writes, “Hunch helps you make decisions and gets smarter the more you use it.”  It then asks you some opening questions in order to teach Hunch more about you.  Some of the questions are normal like, “Where do you live?” and “Male or Female?”, but I personally found, “Are alien abductions real or fake?”, very amusing.  After answering all of the opening questions, I began a search for, “What new car should I buy?”  I had to answer a series of questions pertaining to my needs and taste, then it gave me the answer of “Volkswagen Golf”  It also provides information about your answer seemingly pulled from Wikipedia.  My answer was pretty interesting because I have been interested in the new VW cars lately.

My first impressions are favorable keeping in mind that Hunch just went live to the public today. It definitely needs to be refined a bit both visually and in functionality. My question is, “How are they going to make money?” Fake’s answer to this is, “At the end of your search you will be provided links to sponsoring vendors such as Amazon.”, but at the end of my search there was no such link.  Perhaps this is something going to be rolled out later; keep in mind it just launched today.  Compared to the current trend of instant gratification on the net, I find this a bit lengthy to find my answer but it is an interesting idea.   At one point, I had the image in my head of that annoying guy at the mall that wants you to fill out a survey.  I’m not sure this is the new way, or old way revamped, that search will move, but I’ve been wrong before.

Hunch

BusinessWeek

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