| URL | hunch.com |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Collaboration |
| Registration | Yes |
| Available language(s) | English |
| Launched | June 15, 2009 |
| Current status | Active |
Hunch is a website, designed as a collective intelligence decision-making system that uses decision trees to make decisions based on users' interest. Hunch is building the 'taste graph' for the internet, mapping every person to every entity — and their affinity for that entity. The system asks users a series of questions about a topic to help weigh the options. Upon completion of the questions, the user is presented with results, where he or she can agree or disagree with the results to help "train" the system. Users can also add pros and cons about results. Hunch was launched publicly on June 15, 2009, and since then has been fully open and available to the public.[1] The website reached a total worldwide site traffic of 1.2 million unique visitors in February 2010.
Hunch was co-founded by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake[2] with an 11-person team of MIT graduates.[3] The company is located in New York City.[4] On December 7, 2009, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that he will be joining Hunch.com as Board Member and advisor.[5]
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Hunch started a private preview period in December 2008, but opened the preview to the public in March 2009 as an invitation-only private beta. Users had to request an invitation at Hunch.com, which took a few days to receive.[6] On November 21, 2011 it has been announced that Hunch has been officially acquired by ebay Inc. for a reported 80 Million dollars.[7]
Hunch often publishes reports[8] revealing interesting, odd and sometimes amusing correlations between users who have 'taught' Hunch information about themselves. The reports currently published are: