eBay Buys Hunch

EBay has purchased Hunch, a recommendations engine that’s supposed to figure out what users like, based on their tastes and affinities.

Michael Arrington, who broke the news this morning, pegs the purchase price at “somewhere around $80 million.”

Hunch, led by high-profile CEO Chris Dixon and, for a time, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, had raised around $20 million from investors including Khosla Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners; last year, the company had reportedly mulled a Google deal for around $60 million. The purchase is one in a string of start-up acquisitions for eBay.

Here’s a 2010 interview with Dixon and Fake, conducted by Kara Swisher: