I started looking at BING, the new search/decision engine a couple of weeks ago when I stumbled onto hunch, another search engine that promises to provide decisions.
I have become intrigued by hunch - here is a search engine that asks me questions. hunch promises the information will be kept private and be used to provide better decisions for me. It asked me basic questions - "Where do I live" - and interesting questions - "Do you like the smell of Play-doh" and "What is your favorite style of furniture?" while showing me images. After each response, you find out how your responses compare to others in the hunch environment.
I have learned that 7% of us do not eat meat, 30% of us avoid video games and a whopping 70% of us don't have anyone in our households under the age of 18. (Since hunch is fairly new to the cyberscene, I question how broad the demographics are.)
It took a few tries to get the knack of asking a decision-oriented question. When I ask for information, hunch converts the question to one that asks for a decision: "Is ShamWow a microfiber cloth?" was rephrased to "What is the best car care product for me?"
The decision was "Zwipes, an inexpensive microfiber cloth sold at auto supply stores." The auto industry has been into the microfiber cloths for some time because they are so absorbent. I don't have the answer to my question about ShamWow, but I have a decision about which ones to get and where I can find them.
Now that I was getting the hang of this, I wondered if hunch could have helped me with a decision I made earlier this year. In January, I purchased an I-Phone and despite the massive amount of research I did, I have had a great deal of trouble with it. The Apple folks have bent over backwards to resolve all the issues but they can't keep up with them. Could hunch have helped me avoid these problems?
I typed "Should I get an I-Phone" into the decision requesting window. hunch began asking me a series of questions and based on my answers, said I should get the Google Android. I wanted the Google Android! But I didn't want to wait until May for it to come out.
Next, I tried BING. "Should I get an I-Phone" and it responded with a couple of blogs that posed the question to visitors and a couple of news articles examining the question. But BING did not give me a decision the way hunch did.
hunch is riding along next to Microsoft's 80 million dollar advertising campaign for BING and is the brain child of Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr. I like a lot of things about it but hunch is plagued by not enough information. Caterina Fake admits that with only 2500 silos of information, hunch has a long way to go.
If you try BING out, you can readily see that it is far more developed than hunch but it seems hunch may hold more potential for the future as a decision engine.
Posted by Suzanne Dameron
Director, Emerging Communications