While Product Hunt has always been a great place to discover new services and products, it’s not necessarily the best place to find a product that you need right now.
For example, let’s say this morning I’m behind on work and all I’m concerned with is finding a great to-do list app. While I’m sure there are some great options within Product Hunt’s database of 90,000+ products, the odds are I won’t see one on the home page this morning and a search may leave out some of the best apps.
So today the startup is announcing Ask Product Hunt, a community-powered search engine designed to help people find the products they are looking for. Essentially Product Hunt is calling on their community to recommend the best products to users who either missed the products when they were featured on the home page or just forgot they existed.
Here’s how it works:
Users submit questions like “what’s a good place to find cheap flights” or “what are the best headphones for working?” or “what private VPN do you recommend?”
People can then see these questions and submit their own answers – each of which is tied to a product on Product Hunt. And if you want to submit a product that isn’t in the startup’s directory you can just add the URL of the product and Product Hunt will take care of the rest.
Within each question other users can up vote different answers, or simply mark it as a helpful recommendation. Right now you can’t comment on recommendations made by other users (only on the original question) but the company said they plan to add comments shortly after launch.
Right now, questions are just sorted into categories like recent, hot and needs help. But Product Hunt will also soon sort questions into categories “so users can answer questions they care about (e.g. parenting, artificial intelligence, developer tools, emojis.)” Product Hunt will also add questions and answers to their search platform, so users can get instant results for questions that have already been asked by someone.
Ask Product Hunt should be helpful for users who want to take advantage of the startup’s database of nearly 100,000 products, but don’t feel like combing through lists of services just to find what they’re looking for. It’s also a good way to resurface products that are still relevant but have already been featured on Product Hunt’s home page.
The startup says that Ask Product Hunt will be the biggest change to the platform since they were acquired by AngelList late last year.