You.com raises $25m in Series A funding to take on Google and launches 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.

At You.com we’re on the mission to build a search for this age that puts the user at the center of the equation. With 70% growth in user signups in June 2022, 30% growth in searches month over month, and over 50% retention across our user base, we’ve taken great strides to meet this goal. Now, we’re pleased to announce a new round of funding and the launch of YouCode, a specialized search engine for developers that makes coding more efficient. Having reached this milestone, we’d like to share our vision for what comes next.

Breaking the rules

The internet has changed in the last 20 years, and You.com is the search engine we’re creating for our modern age. YOU, the search engine you control, summarizes today’s internet together with users. We combine the power of user’s choices with artificial intelligence and natural language processing to enable people to get back control over their information diet — without the manipulation of big ad tech from past eras of the web. YOU challenges today’s standards of privacy and offers the choice of a zero trace private mode with just one click.

Building together

We envision You.com becoming an open search platform that allows others to build on top of our search technology. Data transparency, user customization, summarization, privacy, and state of the art search are the foundation of our platform, and we strive to empower the world to build the next search experience together. Through the You.com developer program, developers will be able to build apps that run within the results pages — YouCode is the first step in leveraging the power of this engine. Join the waiting list for the You.com developer program by submitting an inquiry: you.com/developers.

Beginning with coders

According to a study done on 150,000 Google queries, code-related searching often requires more effort (e.g., time, result clicks, and query modifications) than general non-code searching, which indicates code-search performance on Google is less effective for developers.

YouCode is an open source platform that enables coding efficiency by aggregating 20 of the most commonly used developer tools, including Stack Overflow, GitHib, PyTorch, Hugging Face, PyPi, AWS, MDN, JSON formatter, & more. Simply put, it searches all coding sources and apps in one place, saving developers time on almost every query. Features on YouCode include:

• Search on the same tab: Without leaving the current window, find code snippets with easy copy/paste buttons right next to them.
• Code with AI-assistance: YouCode’s AI can generate code based on a 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.
• Access tutorials & academic publications: Apps from W3 Schools are great for beginners, but more advanced developers can quickly jump to more complex tutorials, and copy + paste code right from the app. They can dive deep into Github repos and academic publications like Arxiv to dig into the “why” behind the Code from the authors themselves.
• Catch data errors faster: Validate any JSON file with the JSON Syntax Validator app right on the search results page.
• Find colors: It’s easy to find the exact color you’re looking for by toggling the hue and transparency scales. Copy the HEX, RGB, and HSV values to their clipboard to help find and use their color elsewhere.
• Speed through websites: Access 13,000+ !bang shortcuts to go to other sites’ search results right from your search bar.

Looking forward

YouCode is only one example of how user-centric search can be a productivity force multiplier and transform people’s daily workflows. We plan to evolve our open platform and offer even more search products like YouCode tailored to different niches. Write essays with AI using YouWrite, read summarized shopping editorials in one search on our shopping tab, and search across 9+ social media apps such as Twitter, Reddit, and Quora at once with Social Search by You.com. AI has the potential to completely shift what it means to be an Internet search engine today. We’re incredibly excited for everything that lies ahead, and we’re grateful to all who have joined our journey so far. We hope you too will follow along!

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