After nearly a year in development, the unique Hunch.com site, which supposedly helps users find answers to different problems, has been launched today - June 15.

The singular Hunch site, which has already undergone a three-month preview for select users, is actually a tool that provides users with answers to questions ranging from routine shopping decisions to serious dilemmas. As such, Hunch is aiming at providing users with 'computer-generated advice' on countless lifestyle and consumer questions.

The site works in such a way that the questions and answers are created by users, and the feedback from the community is used to improve the bearing of the results in general.

Hunch. com is a distinct site in the sense that neither is it a search engine scouring the open Web for information - like Google, Microsoft's new Bing and numerous others; nor is it a site for collating written opinions - like Amazon. com. Hunch basically computes answers by weighing what it knows about a particular user against what it knows other people like the user.

About the rationale behind the functioning of the Hunch site, founder Caterina Fake - who has been instrumental in initiating Flickr. com, the popular photo-sharing site that Yahoo acquired in 2005
- said: "Ultimately, what we're doing is providing a kind of shortcut through human expert systems."