During my regular perusal of new happenings on the world wide web I came across Hunch. Hunch.com is a decision-making website which uses a bunch of personal questions to determine the most appropriate answer for you individually. The beta version launched in March 2009 of Hunch was only accessible via invitation. The full opening was 4 days ago.

Hunch - Should I use Hunch?

For example if you are looking to buy some new training shoes you will answer a few questions about yourself and how you will use your shoes. Hunch will then suggest three different trainers with a nice link to an e-commerce site…good idea.

Hunch - Suggestion

If your question requires a simple yes or no answer, for example: Do I need a Smartphone? Hunch will give you a percentage of yes and no e.g. 25% yes and 75% no.

The more questions you answer, the more Hunch knows about you and hence the more relevant the suggestion. Also you can judge the result, if you think that the answer is not relevant you can let Hunch know and they will add this change to its data base.

Hunch is pretty funny to use for stupid questions such as ‘Should I clean my house?’ or ‘Does my breath stink?’ where you don’t really need the advise of a computer. Also it is a good way to know different options that you did not consider (What’s the best dog breed for me?).

I even think that Hunch will provide more practical answers for the day to day life than Wolfram Alpha (please see my previous post)…

This weekend Wolfram Alpha (the new search engine) opened to the public. Wolfram Alpha is supposed to be the most accurate search engine due to the fact that it compiles data from a number of different sources.

A few weeks back I wrote a post about Wolfram Alpha and said that Wolfram Alpha wasn’t the Internet revolution expected by some. I maintain that this new search engine is a good evolutionary step but is far away from a new internet age.

Wolfram Alpha is easy as Google to use. Just enter almost any question and it is going to find the answer with a lot of extra detail. For certain topics Wolfram Alpha offers some interesting graphs.

Wolframe Alpha

Graph Wolfram Alpha

Sometimes, however, the answers are not the most obvious. For example if you are looking for information on‘Clovis’ (who was the first king of France), Wolfram Alpha will provide information about the town ‘Clovis’ in the California. Even with the keywords ‘Clovis France’ Wolfram Alpha does not bring up the expected link, contrary to Google’s results.

Wolfram Alpha - Clovis

Wolfram Alpha seems more like a Wikipedia search engine with exception that the information is accurate but also with less detail. Wolfram Alpha is a good tool with excellent technologies but once again it is not a revolution….

Wolfram Alpha is the new search engine which answers your question directly. Created by British physicist Stephen Wolfram, this new system will compile knowledge in order to give an accurate answer.

It is very simple to use the Wolfram Alpha system, ask a question, for example ‘How many miles is the marathon?’ and Wolfram Alpha will compile information and give you the correct answer.

Wolfram Alpha

This new way to search is considered by some blogs and newspapers as the top of the top. Even the Independent paper wrote ‘The biggest internet revolution for a generation’.

From my point of view this new system is an evolution but we are far from an Internet revolution! It is more or less Wikipedia , the only exception being that the answers are 99% of the time correct. Small revolution…Wikipedia is a pretty trustworthy source anyway.

And sometimes you want to know more than the answer (although Wolfram Alpha will propose to you relevant results).

Rumours are that Wolfram Alpha is looking for a partnership with Wikipedia and Google. And I think this is where Wolfram Alpha software will be very useful. This can improve the Google result (and add the function ‘answer a question’) and improve the veracity of Wikipedia. I think that Wolfram Alpha is more of an addition to an existing technology than a new product by itself. Because I don’t see users switching all the time between Google, Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha.

Once again the future will tell us…