Last week Jake Rocheleau over at insidethewebb was kind enough to interview me about Blurtit.com and how it compares to other Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers.

Heres the link:
Interview with Yahoo! Answers Q&A Competitor Blurtit | Inside the Webb.

This week Blurtit.com was lucky enough to be featured in the business section of the EDP:

Norfolk firm answers web profit puzzle – Norfolk Business News – EDP24.

Today I received an invite to the Hunch private beta, which was pretty exciting, usually when I apply for these things I never hear back from them : (

Anyway if you haven’t heard of Hunch, its a new take on the Questions and Answers format, instead of getting a written answer from another user, it takes you through a simple decision tree, basically it asks you multiple choice questions about the thing your looking for the answer to, after a number of steps it give you an answer.

To better illustrate how it works, check out the video below:

I was pretty impressed with hunch, considering its a brand new service it already seems to have a fairly decent database of questions and seems relatively active. Hunch apparently learns from the feedback users give to it, updating its answers all the time. After using it for a while however, I think there are two issues for Hunch to overcome. While the service performs pretty well on yes/no style questions when things get a bit more complicated or less black and white it struggles, it’s answers become more uncertain and from my experience with Blurtit a large percentage of questions fall into this second category. Hunch also seems to lack the community aspect of more conventional Q&A sites like Blurtit or Yahoo Answers and because of this I am not sure it will hold the attention of its users. That being said of all the new Q&A sites I have seen in the past year Hunch is by far the most innovative and the most promising.

I have just finished watching BBC’s Watchdog review UK text Q&A services.

Watchdog focused on the three largest suppliers: 118 118 (the market leader in the UK), Textperts (recently taken over by 118118) and AQA (Any Question Answered) 63336.

Watchdog which is a weekly consumer affairs programme in the UK, received complaints from viewers concerning the quality of responses, so they decided to investigate.

To test the accuracy of the answers they conducted an experiment, they asked 20 general knowledge question to 118 118, Texperts and AQA 63336 the results are as follows:

Textperts – answered correctly 65% of the time. (text costs £1.00)
118 118 – answered correctly 72.5% of the time. (text costs £1.00)
AQA 63336 – answered correctly 92.5% of the time. (text costs 0.98p)

For the full review see Text question and answer companies