Why we built the best search engine for coders — Introducing YouCode

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.

How do you get better at coding? You practice and try to solve problems faster.

How do you solve coding problems faster? You search for and learn from code snippets and answers on Google.

But as DKB pointed out, Google search is dying thanks to a flood of advertisements and SEO’d nonsense. Plus, finding code on Google is really hard and you end up with tons of open tabs.

According to one study [1] done on 150,000 google queries, “code-related searching often requires more effort (e.g., time, result clicks, and query modifications) than general noncode search, which indicates code search performance with a general search engine [Google] is less effective.”

Paul Graham knew that, way back in 2012, and suggested that someone should “build the search engine all the hackers use [2].”

At You.com, we are plucky developers and entrepreneurs with serious hacker culture, so we built YouCode for like-minded developers. And if you can use it and become better a developer because of it, we will be 100% happier.

What is YouCode?

The best search engine for developers. Available now at https://code.you.com.

How does YouCode work?

As developers, we ourselves want good relevant code snippets, good documentation, great tutorials, etc.

So we built this as an open platform to find only the most relevant coding results from different sources. It’s private, ad-free, and customizable. It also offers intelligent apps that help you get more done faster, using AI-powered apps that can write an essay or an entire coding sequence for you.

Why is YouCode the best search engine for coders?

Simply put, it searches all coding sources and apps in one place, saving you time on almost every query.

Search apps for coding efficiency:

🏫 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

Find code snippets with easy copy/paste buttons right next to them.

Code with AI Assistance

Let AI generate code based on your search query with Code Complete, an app that taps into a large neural net to autocomplete any developer-related query.

Skim through documentation faster

Quickly read through documentation from AWS or developer-focused publications like “Towards Data Science” using side panels.

Jump through beginner or advanced tutorials

Apps from W3 Schools are great for beginners, but more advanced developers can quickly jump to more complex tutorials, or simply copy + paste code right from the app.

Discover high-quality content

Discover great content (and Github repos!) from academic publications like Arxiv to dig into the “why” behind the Code from the authors themselves.

Save time with fewer clicks and fewer query modifications

Leave YouCode open in a tab all day. Its super easy to find a great step-by-step guide and leave the tab open in the background while you code. query: install django

Catch data errors faster

Validate any JSON file with the JSON Syntax Validator app right on the search results page.

Find colors

Find the exact color you want by toggling with the hue and transparency scales. You can also copy the HEX, RGB, and HSV values to your clipboard to help find and use your color elsewhere.

Speed through websites

Access 13,000+ !bang shortcuts to go to other sites’ search results right from your search bar.

!gh GitHub

!so StackOverflow

!hn Hacker News

Side-note: use bangs from address bar w/ extension (has no write access) 👇

Download the extension for easy access

Search You.com using our FREE YouCode Visual Studio Code @code extension so you can stay in the flow.

You.com is a search engine you control. Your sources, your time and your privacy. YouCode is built on the same principle — upvote/downvote sources you want to see and save time. Search less. Code more.

Go ahead, try it, and let us know your feedback, we’d love to hear from you.

Let’s build a better search together!