The search engine wars are getting increasingly irritating. Now, Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim blog is reporting that Flickr co-founder Catarina Fake is launching a new site on Monday that’s not a search engine, but rather a “hunch” engine called Hunch.
This follows on the heels of Bing, Microsoft’s new search decision engine and Wolfram|Alpha, the new search computational knowledge engine (so help me God).
If all of these new kids on the block expect to compete with Google – and they do, whether they admit to it or not – their potential users have to understand why they should use the new products INSTEAD of Google. And dressing it up with some highfalutin’ name will only confuse the users these companies hope to lure.
Personally, I don’t want a machine to make a “decision” for me, I want to “search” for Chinese restaurants, see what my choices are and make my own darned decision.
I don’t want to “search” for an auto mechanic and have a machine give me its “hunch” of what I’m really looking for. My Uncle used to have “hunches” about what women really wanted and he ended up in jail.
As a kicker, now get this…Hunch.com will require you to fill out a personality profile before you can get your search hunch results. So now I have to take a psychology test to find a synopsis for Adam Sandler’s latest movie?
I believe in keeping it simple (because I’m stupid). Mockaholic is a futile attempt at mocking the latest in the tech world. We fail miserably, but at least our objective is simple.
Maybe we should become more obtuse (See, Mom, I use my Word-Of-The-Day calendar) and call Mockaholic a “computational mocking engine.”
I like the sound of that.
-J
