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.