Hunch launches today

Co-founder of Flickr launches 'decision-making' search engine

Beneath all the hype and television advertising of Bing stands another decision making engine.  This one cleaner, cooler and from a startup company – it’s called Hunch.

Hunch officially launched today. The site provides answers to our deepest thoughts and concerns through a 10 question or less, multiple choice process, which Hunch calls, “decision trees.”  How were these questions and answers contrived?  A couple ways – Hunch has a results algorithm which caters to each person using the site.  Also, over the past few months, Hunch ran a beta with 40,000 users.  At the end of any question and answer session, Hunch asks the user if they were satisfied with the result.  Feedback from users is taken into account and is actually part of how Hunch, ‘learns.’

New York-based, Hunch is the creation of Caterina Fake, who co-founded Flickr in 2004.  Before that she worked on Yahoo! Answers.  As co-founder of Hunch, she's brought the company $2 milliion in VC financing from General Catalyst Partners.   The Hunch business model is to sell referral fees to external sites for the subset of topics that have to do with products and services.  Back in April during Beta, Fake said, "we do have some affiliate links to Amazon and others. We're not marketing things to people that they don't want, or hoarding and selling people's data, and of course the presence of a link has no effect on Hunch decision results."

Some additions to the brand new launch of Hunch – it’s added an Explore page which gets updated with new topics and new users.  It’s also launchd a meatier API for people to build upon, although the terms of service have not been worked out yet.

Hunch currently has an 80 percent user satisfaction rate and hopes to reach 90% with the public launch.

For a detailed review of Hunch, read here.