There’s never been a more important time to build a new search engine. We set out to make you.com the interface to your digital life and give our users real control in their search experience and information diet, something we felt was missing in mainstream search.
Many of us are tired of being treated as a product instead of a person and sold to the highest bidder in the form of invasive and obnoxious ad-targeting.
“I’ve spent more than a decade researching artificial intelligence and natural language processing, and I believe search is the most important application of AI and especially NLP today. It’s important for our society and the entire economy as it continues to move online,” -Richard Socher, CEO of you.com.
The future of search is built with the user at the center of everything. We’re excited about the direction we’re heading and wanted to share some of you.com’s unique features:
You.com privacy is unmatched. Switch from personal to private with just one click 🕵️
You.com never sells your data for ad-targeting or follows you around the internet.
Our private mode is the most private of any search engine. We don’t store queries, preferences, or locations. That also means that localized queries (such as “best restaurants near me”) won’t work. For the personal mode, we only store the data necessary to make your experience here more enjoyable.
Personalize your search results by choosing sources where the information comes from 🪄
You.com summarizes the web for you, eliminating the need to open multiple tabs. In the personal mode, you choose your preferred sources and we prioritize results from those sources — saving you time. If you want more Reddit results in your search, we’ve got you covered, so no more typing “site:reddit.com” on your old search engine.
Generate code right in your search results 🧑💻
If you’re a developer, there are many time-saving search apps, including our Code Complete app that taps into a large neural network language model to generate code and autocomplete any query, so you can spend less time searching and more time coding. You.com also makes it easier to search and grab code snippets right in the results, like nginx 403 forbidden django from the Stack Overflow app.
Search across many sources at once with the horizontal layout ➡️
Get a broad overview of a topic in one search via the novel horizontal interface on You.com Instead of a list of blue links, each of the rows represents content from one source (think of each source as a search app), allowing you to see more in one query. Going back to your preferences, you’re in control and can tell you.com what you want to see more of, whether it’s from Stack Overflow, Reddit, Hacker News, Medium, Twitter, or a variety of news sources. (Note: PC/mouse users can now click and drag tiles to scroll horizontally)
Quickly access recipes, product reviews, and how-to directions in side-panels 🧁🎧🛠
If you want to quickly assess a recipe, you can click “read more” to open each recipe in a side panel to scan the ingredients list and instructions, like these cupcakes.
You can do the same for review and how-to apps by clicking “open side panel.” Perhaps you want to know
Filter search results by recency ⏰ and region 🌎🌍🌏
You can tailor your search based on what’s happening in your region. You can also set how recent you want your results (past 24 hours, week, and month).
There is so much more to you.com than outlined here. The future of search will be built with the user at the center of everything. I invite you all to try it at you.com and send us your feedback at hey@you.com.
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