When Caterina Fake was picking out a new bag for her laptop computer, she didn't turn to friends, browse store aisles, or page through magazines for advice. Instead, she consulted her new Web site, Hunch. In response, the tool asked her a series of questions, including "How much are you planning to spend?" and "Would you prefer leather?", before dishing out three recommendations.

Opened to the public on June 15 after a three-month preview for select users, Hunch is a tool for finding answers to a wide variety of questions -- from mundane shopping decisions to dilemmas as serious as "Should I get a divorce?" The questions and answers are created by users, and the site uses feedback from the community to refine the relevance of results.

Hunch is the latest of several decision-making sites that have cropped up in recent years that are designed to shake up a Web-search landscape that has long been dominated by keyword queries. The sites, including Answers.com (ANSW), Mahalo, Aardvark, ChaCha, and Yahoo Answers (YHOO), aim to do what Google and other keyword-based search engines have trouble doing: delivering results tailored to specific human situations and problems without sending users to many different sites on the Internet. "Google can't provide all the answers," says Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Web site Search Engine Land.

Hunch co-founder Fake, who also co-founded image-sharing site Flickr and sold it to Yahoo! in 2005, isn't out to topple Google (GOOG). But she does contend that in an online world where people frequently contribute edits to Wikipedia and thumbs-up stories on Digg, the power of online crowds has yet to be fully harnessed to help people make better everyday decisions. "One little action is actually fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but in the aggregate, these things together create something that's incredibly valuable," she says.

Fake: Flickr, Yahoo Answers, and now Hunch Fake burnished her search skills while still at Yahoo after the Flickr deal. She helped to create one of the most successful question-and-answer sites, Yahoo Answers. Launched in 2005, each month the site attracts tens of millions of visitors who pose questions and get rewarded with recognition for providing the most popular answers to others' questions. In fact, the site gets many of its visitors from traditional search engines like Google, since Yahoo Answers turns up in results when people search for questions like: "Does chocolate spoil?" Fake left Yahoo last year.

Hunch arrives at a response after asking users about five to 10 questions.