Online auction site eBay announced the acquisition of recommendation startup Hunch on Monday for an estimated cost of $80 million (Acquisition pricing has not been revealed at this time).

Launched in 2008 the company will retain their 50-person recommendations team who according to Hunch founder Chris Dixon will move over to join the team at eBay.

eBay has long had a problem predicting what their customers are searching for because many of their products are used or come in unique form which makes them hard to analyze.

According to eBay’s chief technology officer:

“Hunch was solving a similar problem with unstructured data,” he says. “The type of technologies were similar enough that this makes sense.”

How the company will integrate Hunch into their existing platform is still to be seen. What is known is that the company was likely a “hot target” as Michael Arrington explained in his Uncrunched post:

In mid 2010 there were whispers that Google was taking a long look at the company as well, although I haven’t heard anything to suggest they were bidding against Ebay this time around.

How would you like to see eBay change their recommendation engine for the better?

eBay Gobbles Up Hunch For Estimated $80 Million is a post from: The Inquisitr

I’ll admit it- I have a strong prejudice against certain email address domains and even occasionally try to convert people still using undesirable domains.

I don’t know what this says about me (I’m sure it’s not entirely positive), but it seems that the email domain attached to your address at least strongly correlates to some specific profiles. Hunch.com gathered demographic data on 70,000 people, and drafted some general illustrations of what email addresses say about users. The gold standard indicated was firstname.lastname@gmail.com, Vice president of marketing for Hunch Kelly Ford explained:

“It makes it easier for people to remember your name, plus it’s more professional than something that mentions your favorite brand or has a series of numbers… Just like you would carefully pick out clothes to wear to an interview, you want to choose your e-mail domain with the same precision and think about the impression you want to make.”

Email snob fist bump, Kelly. Ford also expounded upon the common threads found surrounding certain domains. GMail users, the study indicated, tended to be more “wordly” males, who were thin, young and have gone places and done things. GMail users also tended to be liberal, childless, prefer digital to physical media (MP3s to CDs) and probably spend a lot of time in coffeehouses talking about locally sourced tomatoes. Okay, I added that last part.

Hotmail users, on the other hand, were found to be more likely suburban females of “average build,” who still live with mom, have a pessimistic attitude, and like “contemporary fiction” and desserts. Users with Yahoo addresses tended to be overweight females ranging up to the age of 49, who, by the general description given, were not at all worldly and frankly, kind of slovenly. AOL users were- is this surprising?- the bottom of the worldliness barrel, as well as older and fatter than all users of the other domains included. (The Oatmeal called this a while back.)

Basically, what you can take away from this is stop using AOL for email if you haven’t already. Christ. Also, if you haven’t jumped on the GMail bandwagon, it’s probably a good idea to try to claim at least part of your actual name for professional use.

Are you judgmental about email address domains? Would you trust someone with your business if they’re emailing you professionally from an AOL account?

Study says email domain stereotypes really do bear out is a post from: The Inquisitr

From a Flickr founder, new search engine Hunch is out of private beta today.

So if you’re Binged out, you’ve been Google Squared and got your kosher-search on, you might need a bit of a helping hand with your next search. Hunch promises to help you find what you’re looking for on the web in “ten questions or less.” Huh. But in a searchy world where Google Answers, Wikia Search and MSN QnA have all disappeared from the landscape, will users trust the collective opinion?

Caterina Fake thinks so. Fake co-founded Flickr and had something to do with Yahoo! Answers before moving on to create Hunch. As you use it, Hunch asks a variety of seemingly irrelevant questions about you- are alien abductions real? Who makes the best fries? Do you like bumper cars? Building on your answers, the site compiles a demographic profile to find the best search results when you need them.

Clearly the site needs more input to work as intended. Earlier today, as I answered the random questions (not geared to a specific search) it would indicate that X% of users responded with that answer. But if it was a choice of three answers, my result was always the same as 33% of respondents, with no variance.

So I took the direct approach, selecting a question from the dropdown menu at the upper right hand corner of the page. Typing in “is” lead to a bunch of questions- I chose “is my partner cheating on me?” (Sorry, honey, it’s for work!)

A series of questions followed- does he tell you where he’s going? Do you both say “I love you?” Does he let you in on his schedule? After the promised ten questions, I was awarded with this result:

I don’t think Hunch will replace Google, nor is it looking to. But it might provide a comfy home for the legions of search engine surfers seeking answers to more personal questions like should I marry my boyfriend or is my son gay?

Hunch currently has a user satisfaction rate of 80%, and Fake believes with more users, it can go as high as 90-95%. So, what do you think? Will you be using Hunch?

Revolutionary search engine #2394: Hunch is a post from: The Inquisitr

Caterina Fake — who, along with her co-founder husband, decided to leave parent company Yahoo last month — will become chief product officer at the yet-to-launch Hunch.

Fake’s blog only says that Hunch is “a consumer internet application” that “will have a lot of user participation” and “is more than a little fun.”

“Beyond that, we’re still making it up,” she says.

CNET News, however, reports that Hunch is a recommendation engine driven by “collective crowd intelligence.” Its sources predict a powerful service with “top-notch” technology. No launch date has been revealed.

Fake says she’ll remain in San Francisco even while working for the New York-based startup. Her husband and former business collaborator, she says, will not be joining her in the new venture.

Flickr Co-Founder Signs With Secretive New Startup is a post from: The Inquisitr