Hunch: Search Engine Or Personal Decision Engine

I often come across some glassy-eyed questions asking whether Hunch (the hyper hyped web service) a search engine? Well, even I’m confused with it, because, I never really was bothered to demark a Google from an WolframAlpha to a Hunch, coz as long as it served my purpose, I never cared. So here the real question for me was, is it utalitarian enough? For a more comprehensive understanding you could read it as an amalgamation of different concepts, which this lesser mortal is going to unveil. Whoof.

From expert views on how Hunch works and the idea behind it, certain things become clear. As Fake explains, its could be categorized under the decision engine concept that was  dropped when Bing and its branding campaign came to fore.

Fake also provides a range of other terms and concepts to describe Hunch. None of these were very precise.

The best way to know Hunch is to try it out hands-on. The tool requires you to start with a question. According to Fake, most of the people arrive at Hunch through links in search results that imitate the query or question the user is asking like

• Which women’s walking shoe should I buy?
• How should I prep for the GMAT?
• Should I get an MBA?
• Should I buy or lease a car?
• Which cheese would I enjoy?
• How can I help my child improve at reading?

After these initial questions the users are offered the decision tree, which again asks question at each step. The answers might  lead to different meanings. During the process, the users can go back or skip questions. At the end of it, Hunch offers a range of options or suggestions to choose from. At present, Hunch offers over 2400 of these questions/answers in Hunch’s database.

Hands-on Experience

Let’s take the example of a question to understand how it works

This is where I ended up.