Hunch

» see hunch.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i knew caterina fake's name from flickr before i ever heard the word hunch. flickr was a site i actually used. hunch, the thing she built next, i only read about. it was a new york recommendation engine, and by the time it launched in june 2009 i was a computer engineer following this kind of thing from ankara without ever making an account.

the idea was a taste graph. you answered a run of odd little questions, would you rather do this or that, and the system used your answers plus everyone else's to guess what you would like next. it started open-ended, from movies to vacations, a machine trying to know you from patterns it found in a crowd.

chris dixon co-founded it with her and the engineering was the real product. ebay saw that and bought the company in november 2011 for a figure reported around eighty million dollars. the recommendation code went inside ebay to suggest things to buy. the public site, the part with the questions, lost its reason to exist and was shut down in march 2014. the engine lived on where nobody could see it.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

in 2009 recommendation still felt like a frontier. netflix was running a million-dollar prize to improve its own guesses. hunch's bet was that a person's taste in one thing predicts their taste in another, and that you could bootstrap the whole map from a game of questions. from where i sat, reading about it, it was one of the more honest attempts to make a computer feel like it understood you, before the phrase machine learning was on every slide.

~ what really happened ~

hunch did not fail in the usual way. it got bought, and the buyer wanted the brain, not the face. that is a specific kind of ending. the site people could visit went dark while the thing it was really made of kept running, folded into ebay's recommendations and later into whatever came after. a taste engine that spent its afterlife guessing what you might add to a cart, which is a smaller job than the one it was born for.

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