Earlier today, Flickr co-founder and social media maven Caterina Fake released a new and exciting project now known as Hunch. Much like Google (and other search engines), the new project is built around complex algorithms, but unlike Google (and other search engines) – which are designed to answer search queries – Hunch is designed to answer questions and even further – to then make decisions for you.
How it works? Hunch takes your user generated data – received through extensive profile surveys as well as site use – and plugs it into their aforementioned algorithms, which then spit out clean looking decision trees. These decision trees typically consist of five to ten questions which are constructed to narrow down answers to your question until there is only once choice left.
What happens if you don’t like your answer? Simple. Click, “No” when asked if the answer is sufficient. This step not only ensures better future results for you, but for anyone else with similar questions as well. This is because Hunch is designed to get better and more precise answers the more it is used. The reason being: the more it knows about you (and others like you), the better it will be at providing answers.
And like almost all Web 2.0 platforms, Hunch comes with social community attached to it too. That’s right, you can add friends, earn banjos (the preferred currency of Bunch users), find people with similar interests and even devise questions, topics and answers ahead of time (note: user generated topics and answers only reach the main page if they are voted there).
While some have compared the new platform to the ever popular Yahoo! Answers, co-founder Fake notes large differences. For one, unlike Y! Answers, Hunch retains previous knowledge, but even further – Bunch also builds on this knowledge, analyzes it, organizes it and then presents it in to a nice, simple and user-friendly platform.
Comments
Jack
June 15th, 2009 - 1:46:42 PM
should i post a blog comment? do you like to waste time while at work? a.) yes b.) no
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