Swipe right ➡️: How you.com is
upgrading the search engine
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.
Many of you have noticed that you.com doesn’t look like your typical search engine, and that’s true — we’ve changed the search experience.
Instead of the conventional list of blue links, one of the first things You.com users notice about you.com is our innovative interface that lets them interact with content by swiping left and right and moving sources up and down based on their preferences.
As you.com’s founder and CEO Richard Socher explained to Digital Trends last year:
Richard Socher
CEO, You.com
When you think about Instagram and TikTok, people are very used to swiping left, right, and up and down. If you’re on Instagram, you swipe left to see more pictures of that story. Then, if you swipe down, you see the next story. We don’t want to have this massive engagement track of social networks. We want to help you search less and do more. Get things done, save your time, and summarize the web for you. But these are still very convenient ways to interact with content and are very intuitive — especially to younger generations.
Here’s how we’re doing things differently than your old search engine:
➡️ Scroll left. Scroll right. Scroll up. Scroll down.
Create your free account and select your preferred sources. you.com organizes your search results into rows by source (think of each source as an app) and into tiles with useful summaries, so you can find what you’re looking for no matter how you scroll.
🚀 Or jump right to any source without having to scroll anywhere.
Quickly jump to the source you want to explore right in the shortcuts bar at the top of the page.
Let’s say you want to read about bitcoin on Wikipedia; you can leap to that content.
🪂 Then scroll horizontally to dive deeper into a single source.
Horizontal scrolling lets you dive deeper into each source, like our Wikipedia app, which now displays even more content, filling that once empty space to the right of the page.
Here are some ways to navigate in 2-D, unlike your old search engine’s 1-D list of links: Click and drag the mouse button or trackpad, or Shift + scroll with your mouse wheel or trackpad, or the scroll buttons on your keyboard.
➕ Add any apps that didn’t show up in your initial search results.
Quickly get more results for your existing query in the shortcuts bar at the bottom of the results page. You can even trigger more search apps based on categories, like developer, web, social, shopping, news, learning, recipe, how-to and more.
❓And see more without leaving the results page.
The new UI for our Quick Facts app lets you open a “people also ask” side panel that also features more queries that “You.com users also searched for.”
Those are just a few of the many updates we’ve made. We’d love to have you try it out.
Be sure to create a profile, pick your sources, and see results tailored to you. And if you need that extra privacy, turn on the private mode in one click where nothing is stored. We’ll never sell your personal data for ad-targeting, no matter what mode you use.
Happy searching! 🔍
Help us spread the word about YOU.COM. Join our community on Discord, Tweet a review, or share your search experience with a friend. You can also add our privacy-preserving Chrome extension.
