For those who do not know, Product Hunt is a website designed to discover products and services online. It was founded in 2013 by Ryan Hoover and has the support of Y Combinator, host of other websites such as the popular Hacker News, among other projects.
Today the managers of the company have announced a new initiative with which to ask for recommendations to the community of users, as stated in TechCrunch. The new adventure will be called Ask Product Hunt, a search engine driven by the community that will allow anyone what they are looking for.
According to the media, with this initiative what they want from Product Hunt is to encourage the community to recommend products to users who either did not find what they were looking for, or forgot that they simply existed. And it’s a good idea to keep in mind.
This is how Ask Product Hunt works
First, it all starts with a question. Something like “what free program can I use to edit video”, “what VPN service do you recommend” or “what Bluetooth headphones should I buy”. From here, the community can see the questions and issue their own answers, each one linked to a product on the web.
Within each question, users can vote different answers, something that we have already seen in other places on the Internet, such as Menéame or Reddit. You can also mark a recommendation as “useful”. For now you can not comment on the recommendations made by other users, only the original recommendation, although Product Hunt says that it will soon be possible.
According to the media, the questions are organized into categories such as recent , hot and needs help (all this sounds good to us), although they have announced that they will soon add product categories for each answer: open source, web, technology, games, development tools and etc.
Another interesting aspect is that questions and answers will be added to the search engine , so that users will have instant results to questions that anyone else has already been able to ask.
Ask Product Hunt will be useful for users who want to take advantage of the company’s database , which today consists of more than 100,000 products, and who do not want to waste time searching through lists of services until they get what they need .
It can also be a way of reviving still relevant products that have already appeared on the page before. And of course, the question-answer formula can be the way in which the end users are interested in the project, since in a few words they will be able to find what they are looking for, without having to dive between the lists.
