Hunch.com: Making Decisions Easier?

By Megan McDonald, Search Coordinator

I stumbled upon Hunch while perusing on Facebook one day, but I didn’t really become intrigued until reading Aaron Goldman’s post, Is Hunch The IPhone Of Search? Aaron proposed that Hunch has the potential to pull ahead of Google if they figure out how to get all the facts we would normally research through search queries and put them together for us in one ultimate decision. So, I decided to see exactly what this Hunch could really do.

When I first came to Hunch, I wondered if it was possible that a website could actually tell me what to do, and do it correctly. I went through and tested several topics, and honestly, Hunch seemed to “get” me most of the time, with a few exceptions. Hunch knew that I would prefer living in the Midwest and that I should travel to Brazil (a long time dream of mine). However, Hunch struggled with some topics, suggesting that I read To the Lighthouse, one of my least favorite books. Hunch also had the nerve to say that I have turned into my parents. Obviously NOT true.

In the end, even though the decisions that Hunch chose for me were fairly spot-on, the more interesting part to me is that Hunch holds tons of intriguing, maybe irrelevant knowledge. For example, Hunch knows that its users that prefer aisle seats usually spend more on others than themselves. In addition to all this potentially valuable data, Hunch is linking suggested products (like what GPS device you should get) to sites where you can purchase them online. What could be easier than someone telling you what to buy and then sending you to a place to buy it from? So, if Hunch can continually improve its decision making algorithm, then it would seem like Google might have something to compete against.