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You.com — Private search engine that summarizes the web
You.com, the world's first open search engine platform that summarizes the web for users, with superior privacy choices, actionable results, extensible apps and personalization through preferred sources.
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Joanfihu
You and also Google are removing the need to open links from search results, thus harming content creators. For example, by embedding Stack Overflow results, Stack Overflow is not showing their job adverts or their paid products adverts (Teams). Embedded results are very convenient as a search user but not so great as a content creator. This is something to think about. Some content creators are starting to be pissed off with Google about it. Particularly since the introduction of snippets.
If at some point you monetised the platform with advertising, you could share revenues with content creators for embedded results, which I believe is something Google doesn't do.
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@joanfihu Hey. We love good content creators and have been super happy that several users told us they started or re-activated their medium accounts thanks to the content they found on you.com
The apps that you see, will actually be given to the respective organization when they want them. We're just starting and seeing the platform but plan to open it up more and more in the coming months. We want to help companies achieve their goals and bring useful actionable content to users but have ownership over their app.
We think of the you.com apps more like a company's iphone app. It's their branding, content and monetization (within our values, e.g. they can't add tracking pixels, etc).
We think this is the only way users can have the convenience of that first page but the entire rest of the economy can participate and benefit from that better user experience. Instead of everybody having to pay a Google tax just to exist.
You should make you.com your default search engine. I've been using it as mine for a couple of months now. The interface is dope — and I think my developer friends are especially going to love it for coding.
Shout out to my friend and you.com's founder Richard Socher for building the future of search. Richard is one of the most brilliant minds in AI/NLP, and he's also one of the nicest guys you'll meet — a rare combination. Best of luck, Richard and team!
I understand the ambition and the value prop, but when I search something typical like "best hotels san francisco", I get the exact same results as Google, ie, a god aweful result : "25 Best hotels from Booking..", "44 Best hotels from trip advisor..." , "10 Best from Conde Nast"
Do you plan on applying ML to summarize these types of use cases ?
@raphael_io Yes that's the plan :) we are getting to one use case after another
Fun features for the developer community, very smart. Beautiful and intuitive UI/UX, as well.
@rueter We bring back agency to our users by giving them control over sources they prefer. In the future, we will also allow developers to submit apps to the platform.
<3
@villainjosh hehe. yea. we'll see how that one shakes out. might be the one disadvantage to have one of the few personal pronoun URLs on the planet.. (:
Stoked for the launch! Congrats Richard, Julia and team!
Curious to know, what kinda growth moves you are making to onboard users? Since everyone is wired to Google or other search engines.
@5harath We'll have to share those with you as we roll out. Don't want to give all our good ideas to the competition before we get a chance to test them out ourselves. You're totally right. That will be a long struggle. It's a big 2tr$ monopoly.
Why is it unusable without the chrome extension? I would love to try it as my default search engine but because of this I cant.
I use Vivaldi as a browser which can use chrome extensions but not this one.
@mullerickins Sorry for the inconvenience. Not sure why the extension doesn't work in Vivaldi.
If you set your search engine default to you.com manually in Vivaldi with "https://you.com/search?q=%s" you will not need the extension.
You can see Vivaldi steps also linked for the FAQ:
https://youdotcom.notion.site/FA...
@richardsocher I was able to do that. However whenever I search fpr something and then decide to search for something else in the top bar of you.com I get met with a "you’ll need to add the you.com Chrome extension". This is very annoying because people who search things usually want to then modify what they searched to get a better result. And I cant do that here.
@mullerickins Yea, the extension takes 5 seconds to install or uninstall. We found that the majority of users want that convenience. It's a very small extension and has no other features or functionality. It's not one of those sketchy extensions. I hate those myself.
@mullerickins Hi Erick, thanks for your feedback. The extension requirement is gone and we are fully open in all browsers. Happy searching!
Love the UI and so far I've gotten relevant results for most searches…except for when I searched for myself and my location. haha It's not like I'm famous or anything (not like Ricky Powell, for instance) but Google found my flickr, YouPic, Linkedin, and Insta accounts with no problem. You.com doesn't place me on Instagram at all even though I am the only Rick Powell without any numbers or symbols or punctuation in my username. (The very first Rick Powell on Instagram!) Google also found several photos that were actually of me. You.com found one photo that I took and that's it. That's all weird and not ideal, isn't it?
@fascinating_monsters Hi Rick - thanks for your feedback, we will work on improving people search and ranking experience!
https://you.com/search?q=rick+po... - Btw cool instagram! :)
@swethmandava Why thank you! I see when you search for just my name, it finds me on Insta, but it's still weird because when I searched for me and Mexico City, I wasn't there but my other social profiles were visible. All my recent photos are in CDMX, like the last two years. Thanks for replying.
Congrats Richard on the launch. Great to see continued innovation in search. The layout is very attractive and it's convenient to see results from different sources grouped together. When I completed my first search my initial reaction was "woah, woah, that's a ton of information to process", especially with the combined vertical and horizontal scrolling. Perhaps there is an opportunity to make the info more easy to digest. Best of luck to you and your team.
As with all product that change how things fundamentally work, it took a while to get a hang of it.
I had to retrain my brain to scan the results a different way, so although it might seem frustrating at first, it's worth it 💪
Once you get a hang of it, you can get really profficient at getting to the right result FAST.
tl;dr: you'll be spending more time in the SERP, but less time opening and closing tabs 😁
@wilhelmr That's right. Say good-bye to sifting through 20 different tabs :)
@hasan779 Currently it's not possible but we'll make a note of your feedback. Thanks Hasan :)
@burinnik Thanks so much. And we are just getting started. So much more to come :)
@richardsocher Looking forward to it Richard! Thanks again for an amazing product! I think my only request as a user would be dark mode ;)
Been using it since more then 6 months now and it’s especially useful for all engineering related searches 🦄 huge fan of this!
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Congrats on the product, but it was almost impossible to use it without installing a Chrome extension. I think it's being too pushy. I get being aggressive to get users but it went from "This is a cool project" to "Nope, thanks". Best of luck with the project!
@juanrossi Thanks for the feedback. I understand. Most extensions are super sketch.
We dropped the requirement and it's now fully open.
The extension only has write access for one field (search engine), no read access but there's a lot of negativity around extensions so we listened and got rid of the requirement.
@juanrossi I agree. I typed a search query into you.com, got "To see results and get the convenience of you.com, you’ll need to add the you.com Chrome extension" and thought "YOU must be kidding me". I fail to see the argument about default search engines when I am searching right from the homepage.
@juanrossi @richardsocher Your first search is way too early to ask for that. Are you tracking this conversion?
@juanrossi agree on this, it's the reason why I closed the page directly. I first want to get a taste of it without having to install any extension.