Hunch.com

I’ll start with a condensed description of the website I’ll be talking about in this post. Hunch is a sort of high-tech 8-ball, except it should be more accurate than “Yes,” No,” Maybe,” and so on. Instead, it’ll give specific answers to your specific questions, assuming somebody has already made an answer.

If that explanation wasn’t enough, the rest of the post should help. The basic premise of Hunch.com is a user-built automatic version of Yahoo! Answers. You ask it a question, it asks you a few questions, you answer them  to help it determine the answer, and you’re done.

The best way to illustrate that short of having you try it yourself is to share my experience with it. I recently bought a pair of earbud headphones after the ones I had started malfunctioning. I was looking for something durable with reasonable sound quality and wanted a middle-of-the-road price. I found a question like that, answered accordingly, and ended up buying a pair of V-Moda Vibe earbuds. No word yet on whether they’re definitely great or terrible, but I haven’t had any problems with them in the week I’ve had them for.

Another example is more relevant to you. As I wrote this post, I was looking at the front page of Hunch.com to make sure I had all the information I needed. I saw a question along the lines of “What URL Shortener Should I Use?” and clicked it, as I’d been looking at Su.Pr (Stumbleupon’s new data gatherer). I “told” Hunch I wanted to be able to find statistics, didn’t care much about this, cared about that, and less than a minute later, I had my answer. Tr.im is my current URL shortening service. Hopefully it’ll work as well as I’ve been informed.

In some ways, this is a lot like Wolfram|Alpha. You ask a question, then it finds you the answer without all of the extra information. The difference here is that while Wolfram|Alpha mostly deals with pure data, the human input Hunch.com has allows you to ask much more abstract questions and get all sorts of (good) answers. You can think of it as Wolfram|Alpha meets Wikipedia or eHow in some ways.

Again, the URL is Hunch.com. I’ve linked it to the Tr.im version, but you’ll end up going to the same place.