Hunch: The Search for Better Search

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Answer engines have a poor track record of late. In May, Microsoft (MSFT) closed its MSN QnA, a service similar to Yahoo Answers. In March, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced he was closing Wikia Search, a short-lived project intended to create user-influenced results to keyword queries. Google once offered a collaborative search site called Google Answers, where people could offer money rewards for thoroughly researched responses to queries. The company axed the site in 2006, telling users "the Answers community's limited size and other product considerations made it more effective for us to focus our efforts on other ways to help our users find information."

A large base of active users is essential for making these types of sites useful, says Brady Forrest, a technical evangelist at O'Reilly Media who previously worked on the search team at Microsoft and helped develop the prototype of MSN QnA. "You have to constantly be able to pull in a certain crop of answerers who will invest the time to go in and talk about whether you should buy this laptop or that laptop and keep it updated," he says.

"they might get more valuable advertisers"

Profits also hinge on these sites reaching a wide audience. "Many of these services are ad-based, which is problematic, says Greg Sterling, founding principal at technology market researcher Sterling Market Intelligence. '"In order to make that work, you have to have a massive audience.""

Could answer services one day be as lucrative as the search business? Eschewing banner or text ads, Hunch plans to get all of its revenue from fees it receives by sending users to shopping sites like Amazon.com (AMZN). So while it may profit from only a small portion of the questions on its site, search experts say these links could be very profitable since people are already coming to the site with the intention to buy something. "Potentially, they might get more valuable advertisers," says Search Engine Land's Sullivan.

Sullivan says Google and other keyword search engines may lose a small portion of users to decision sites like Hunch, but generally he thinks the category is creating new searches that weren't done before at all. "They enlarge the search pie overall," he says, adding that when video started appearing on the Web, it prompted a similar boom in new types of searches that didn't exist before.

Thas isn't stopping traditional search engines from trying to compete with these upstarts by trying to offer smarter searches. In May, Microsoft unveiled Bing, a new incarnation of its Web search that's billed as the "decision engine." The site includes information such as average plane ticket prices for a search of "Chicago to London" right on the first page of search results.

Douglas MacMillan is a staff writer for BusinessWeek in New York.

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