Designing the Future of AI-Powered Search with YOU

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.

Nowadays, the world is buzzing with the rise of generative AI. Despite this monumental technological shift, history is repeating itself, with just a few corporations looking to dominate the field and transform our access to this powerful technology into their own walled gardens.

It’s a saga originally described by Quincy Larson, the founder of freeCodeCamp, in regard to recent information technology innovations, and generative AI is taking on one that is eerily similar:

1. Inventors discover a technology.
2. Enthusiasts and hobbyists experiment with it, finding innovative applications and spreading its popularity.
3. Corporations take notice, commercializing, refining, and scaling the technology.
4. Once these corporations gain enough power, they trick governments into helping them lock down the technology, securing their positions as “natural monopolies.”

It sounds farfetched, but corporations do it to boost profits — all at the expense of improving user experience and fulfilling user needs.

Currently, we’re entrenched in step 3 of the generative AI saga, with monopolies quite literally entering the chat. Only three months after You.com introduced YouChat, the first conversational and generative AI search assistant, both Bing and Google launched conversational searches known as Bing Chat and Bard, though they’ve had access to that technology for years. Ironically, both launches left much to be desired.

Still, the potential of generative AI is far beyond what mainstream search engines can currently offer, as their queries only represent a fraction of the possible searches that could be made. You.com wants to change that, bringing a new realm of search possibilities that was previously considered unattainable to all users — FOR FREE, IMMEDIATELY.

Redesigning generative AI and semantic search

We’ve redesigned how Generative AI and semantic search work together:

• – Introducing citations into chat
• – Bringing multi-modal apps into search
• – Combining conversational AI with web data
• – Rewriting queries
• – Enabling personalized and private access to chat history
• – Aligning user incentives with the ability to offer free products via private ads

Here’s how our AI search works:

Citations

You may have noticed that YouChat generations include numeric references and sources to the right of the chats. With these citations, you can confirm that generations are accurate and not fabricated, a concern that users have with other large language models. To ensure that our models meet the highest standards, we track the number of citations and evaluate them offline as we refine our model. We use learnings to prompt the model to include more or fewer citations, depending on user needs.

Innovative YOU Apps

Thanks to the data we’ve crawled and the apps we’ve built over the past year, we’re able to provide precise answers to your queries. YouChat is trained to recognize when our apps can help with a query, making it easier for users to find what they need.

Our approach is designed to provide you with objective, external data you can validate and verify. Moving forward, we plan to continuously improve our apps and data collection methods. By doing so, we will be able to provide even more accurate and reliable information to our users.

Chat + Web

We recognize that different users have different preferences, which is why we’ve added web results to the right panel. This way, you can still access the benefits of our platform while having the option to view traditional search results. We believe this approach provides the best of both worlds and demonstrates our commitment to meeting the needs of all users.

Rewriting queries

In extended conversations, users may change topics or reference previous discussion points. Initially, we received feedback that our system struggled to effectively handle these conversational shifts. We recognized the importance of resolving this issue and invested significant time and energy into improving our machine learning models. As a result, we’ve made vast strides in our ability to reference and build upon previous turns of conversation. We believe this has greatly improved the user experience and helps to foster more natural and productive chats.

Chat History

YouChat automatically saves any useful information it generates for you, keeping it private and visible only to you as a logged-in user. This feature allows you to “time travel” through past conversations, fostering productivity and enabling you to re-use and re-find information whenever you need it. With these capabilities, YouChat becomes a truly sticky feature that enhances your overall web experience.

Private Ads

We recently integrated private advertisements into YouChat. These non-invasive ads don’t collect personal data or follow you around the web, but they allow us to generate revenue so we can continue offering you a premium service for free. Unlike traditional search engine advertisements based on cookies, demographics, online behavior, and shopping history, private ads display relevant information based only on the words or phrases that users search.

What’s next for YOU?

At You.com, we’re always striving to be at the forefront of innovation. Our team of ambitious engineers are currently working on improving our private search engine to enable you to accomplish more — whether that means creating new content, explaining complex concepts, making art, or writing code. Join us in the search for a more productive future with YOU. We’ll have more updates in the world of conversation, image and text generation soon.