Developers search faster on You.com than on Google. Study reveals.

Disclaimer: This blog post was published prior to You.com’s latest AI advancements and may not reflect our current capabilities. You.com has transformed from a search engine to an AI assistant. With a foundation in search and the team’s AI expertise, You.com was perfectly positioned to enhance LLMs with live access to the Internet to address issues around hallucinations and transparency. As such, You.com is capable of tasks ranging from searching online to writing an essay, debugging code, creating digital art, solving complex problems, and more. Learn more about getting the most out of You.com.

You.com also offers its core technology through a suite of self-serve APIs. Get complete details about the YOU API.

We’re sure you can relate. You are writing a lot of code, switching between languages, and you don’t remember every standard library method or the specific syntax for an obscure case.

Every few dozen lines of code, you stop and look up something online.

You are not alone.

There are around 24 million developers in the world, and by 2024 that number is expected to grow to approximately 29 million. What most developers have in common is that they search for code on Google.

But that’s exactly the problem.

Why general search engines don’t serve coders

Never before have so many people developed so much code. While this code explosion has resulted in thousands of new, useful pieces of software, the ability to search for coding solutions quickly and accurately has become exponentially harder on Google.

Google is not great for finding code.

As a general search engine, Google first has to determine user search intent and then return the right results from trillions of web pages. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the more targeted the coding search, the harder it is for Google to parse the sheer volume of content and SEO noise to provide a quality result.

It’s why we set out to build the best search engine for coders — YouCode!

But how can a small startup like You.com validate that its search engine is better than Google? One way is through positive user feedback.

Another is to conduct a study using actual coders who search on Google every day. We partnered with Surge AI to conduct an independent study using human evaluators.

Setting up a blind study

Since Google monopolizes the search market with 80% market share, even the most objective coders are biased — they are simply familiar with Google’s interface and how the results are displayed. Most importantly, the Google algorithm is familiar with them and their search habits.

To level the playing field, we conducted a blind study.

We asked users to search using new, previously unseen queries, and alternate the search engine they used first.

The type of coding queries that evaluators tested included general coding, debugging, and troubleshooting queries.

• – Here are example General Coding Queries: How to setup mysql server, how to create an executable with a GUI, In which situation would you use useMemo() in React?

Query: “Why is verifying REQUEST_METHOD type using if ($_SERVER bad practice?”

• Here are example Debugging & Troubleshooting Queries: pytorch clear vram cuda out of memory error without restart kernel, mysql table 1064 error create table, python import playsound not working partially initialized module

Query: ”Node.js file not being uploaded with post request”

So what did we learn?

Key findings and takeaways

*You can check out the raw results here.

Finding #1: YouCode consistently outperformed Google on developer queries (both general coding & debugging)

• – In 72% of developer queries, YouCode results were the same or better than Google’s.
• – In 53% of developer queries, YouCode results were much or little better than Google’s.
• – In only 14% of developer queries, Google results were much better than YouCode results.

Finding #2: YouCode outperforms Google on general coding queries.

• – In 63% of general coding queries, YouCode results were the same or better than Google’s.
• – In 58% of general coding queries, YouCode results were much or little better than Google’s.

Finding #3: YouCode outperforms Google on 90% of all debugging and troubleshooting coding queries.

• – In 90% of the debugging and troubleshooting coding queries, YouCode performed same or better than Google
• – YouCode was either much or little better than Google in 45% of debugging and troubleshooting queries.

Finding #4: Coders spend less time searching for code on YouCode than on Google

• – When YouCode is better than Google, YouCode saved users 58% in search time. That’s 20.6 seconds saved per search on average.

* Listed averages and search time reductions are specific to the queries for which You.com/code outperformed Google

So, what makes searching on YouCode so much better for coders than searching on Google?

We believe our highly relevant apps and intentional design are our superpower:

YouCode searches all coding sources and apps in one place so that you can save time on almost every query.

• -🏫 ArXiv 📦 AWS 💾 Code Complete 🎨 Color Picker 🤓 Geeks for Geeks 🐈‍⬛ GitHub 🤗 Hugging Face ✅ JSON formatter 🪟Microsoft Docs Ⓜ️ MDN 🧱 PyPi 🔥 PyTorch 📜 Read The Docs 📂 StackOverflow 👓 Towards Data Science 📗 Tutorials Point

YouCode features code snippets that users can easily copy/paste.

• Big coding repositories containing clean code snippets can be overwhelming and painful to navigate, slowing down developers who are in a rush to find what they need. We feature snippets prominently and allow developers to copy them with the click of a button.

YouCode apps summarize information by topic, popularity, and subject and are designed with a horizontal scroll for faster skimming.

• We used artificial intelligence and natural language processing to parse large informational repositories into concise summaries with side panels that expand to reveal the most important information.

The code generation apps of YouCode AI allow you to generate even the most complex code using AI.

• YouCode AI apps take search beyond traditional webpages and allow you to generate anything from Regex to SQL right in your search results.

Planning for the Future

You.com thrives on experimentation, science, and user feedback. We hope you’ll comment down below with any feedback. As we continue to innovate, we will take even bigger swings with more developer-focused and generative AI apps. Stay tuned for future external studies that evaluate our search engine for effectiveness. We are just getting started and promise it’ll be fun.

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