You.com: The search engine that puts you in control
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.
Today marks exactly one month since You.com’s public beta launch, and the team and I are excited about the feedback we’ve received so far. It’s been gratifying to share you.com with you, and I want to thank you all for providing your ideas and suggestions. Please keep them coming!
We set out to make you.com the interface to your digital life and give our users real control in their search experience and information diet, something we felt was missing in mainstream search.
Like I’ve heard from many of you, I was tired of being treated as a product instead of a person and sold to the highest bidder in the form of invasive and obnoxious ad-targeting. I just wanted actual and relevant results, not a page full of ads and SEO’d sites that waste our time. A core tenant of you.com is that you should be able to search less and do more.
You.com offers useful and actionable summaries in a whole new interface that gives users more control and agency with explicit customization of preferred sources and great privacy with choice. At you.com, we know that users want to trust that their data belongs to them, and they won’t be followed around the internet or receive privacy-invading targeted ads.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard from many of our users that they care deeply about privacy and the closely related data transparency. Yet many don’t want to trade off convenience either. At you.com, we think we’ve found that balance of best-in-class privacy with our private mode available in one click, and the convenience offered by our personalized mode lets users set their preferred sources like Twitter, Reddit, StackOverflow, etc. And no matter what mode you’re in — private or personalized — we’ll never sell your data, follow you around the web, or force privacy-invading targeted ads on you. That is our promise to you.
There’s no better time to build a new search engine. I’ve spent more than a decade researching artificial intelligence and natural language processing, and I believe search is the most important application of AI and especially NLP today. It’s important for our society and the entire economy as it continues to move online.
The future of search will be built with the user at the center of everything. We’re excited about the direction we’re heading and can’t wait to share some of the features coming to you.com very soon. We’ve already shared a bunch in our beta Slack channel. We’ll also be sharing frequent updates on this blog, answering your questions, and sharing tips, so please leave a comment or question below 🙂
There’s still more great work to do, and we’re glad you’re here. Better, better. Never done!
Many wishes,
Richard Socher
You can find us on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. You can also install the Chrome extension (it doesn’t have any read access).
