My name is Richard Socher, and I'm the founder of you.com, the world's first open search engine platform that summarizes the web for you. We launched our public beta today, and are excited to share it with you.
If you're a developer, we have several "search-apps" such as StackOverflow (with code snippets), W3Schools, MDN, Copilot-like Code Completion, json checkers, and more. All of them geared to help you code faster. Let us know if you have other app ideas for how to make your coding life better.
We believe in superior privacy choices without losing convenience. Our private mode is the most private experience - we don't store your queries or track your clicks or share IP, etc. And even in our personalized experience, we'll never sell your data or follow you around the web and we'll never offer privacy-invading targeted ads.
We wanted to create a search engine that delivers relevant content, not ads or SEO'd pages, and do it in a whole new interface that puts you in control through personalized preferences. We hope you'll be able to search less and do more.
Looking forward to your feedback and will be here to answer any questions.
I'd like to know more about the "built for devs" concept you are presenting to us. What does that mean to you?
For me personally, I rarely perform site:github.com or site:stackoverflow.com searches in my browser's default search engine. I typically just enter a few keywords and try to make sense of what I find.
When I personally think of a search engine built for devs, I think of one that parses queries differently from the natural language processing that seems to be all the rage these days. For instance, when I search "?. C#" I want to know what this operator actually is. Instead, the algorithm omits the ?. and just returns the most generic results relating to C#. https://you.com/search?q=%3F.%20C%23&fromSearchBar=true This is true even when I put the "?." in quotes. One of the results is titled "Null coalescing operator" from Wikipedia, but this is actually misleading since ?. is actually the null-conditional operator. The information is there but it is not easy to find.
The other item on my wishlist for a dev-centric search engine is to be able to persist the main language(s) I am trying to search about. Its mildly tedious to type C3 and then my keywords (..... dammit, C#, this happens ALL the time), in each query to narrow things down and not get javascript results.
Hey. Sorry for the slow reply.
We will open up the platform so people can contribute their own apps to the platform.
You can also prefer certain sources and hence have real agency over your results.
We'll look into the ?.C# query and what can be done better for queries like it.
Thanks for your feedback :)
I found your pitch really interesting, I'd love to try it. I, however, refuse to install an extension and change my default search engine just to be allowed to type in a search query.
I'm sure you have some "growth hacking" reason for this that is compelling to you. Maybe you hope that the slight annoyance of switching back will outweigh the inevitable annoyances with a new product like this.
It does come off as user hostile though - you're trying to badger me to switch rather than selling me on the merits of you.com.
I strongly second this. I immediately gave up on trying it out once I realized I had to download something. Your KPIs should be around how sticky your search features are, it seems like it is currently based on download counts.
If they published the extension source that might be more reasonable. I assume the extension is so a lot of heavy lifting on hitting individual apps/ API's happens locally to alleviate costs or rate limiting
Working on it right now :)
Extension changes your navbar setting. It's 33kB.
All the heavy lifting happens on our servers so as to not slow browsers down for users.
Thanks.
We got lots of love in other places like Twitter, LinkedIn, ProductHunt, Facebook and others. So that made the launch an overall big success :)
The only purpose of the extension is to make it convenient and easy to change your default on Chrome. Convenience usually wins on the internet.
The extension has permissions to write to one field. No read access. Chrome flags and lets you verify permissions when you install an extension.
Sadly, most users on the internet would not go into their settings to make a change.
Of course, here on HN there are a lot of experts who care about their privacy and can make that change manually.
We've listened and it's not required anymore to try it out. Being fully open is ultimately more aligned with our values of trust, facts and kindness.
Hey.
Yea. We struggle with the extension -> navbar search requirement also.
We have found that if you're not the default engine that is easily accessible from the Navbar, you will not be able to break the Google monopoly.
We also found that many people will just do a quick search for "asd" or "weather" and then leave because those searches aren't really differentiated (and just can't really be).
Our extension is 33kB and has no other features. It's easy to see the source so you can see that it does nothing interesting or sketchy. It changes the setting. You can change that setting manually and get the same effect and usage after. But most users don't know how to change a setting and you got some large 2tr$ monopoly that doesn't want you to change...
I strongly second not gating the service. Honestly, I laughed and closed the tab when I saw that I had to install an extension.
Furthermore, literally drawing a search-box and then having it not actually perform a search is a dark-pattern. If you have to trick people into doing an action, it's probably not the right thing to do.
If you have differentiating features, show people them! Optimize your flow on how you're different. If there aren't niches (e.g. some people use Bing for differentiated image search or travel) that people will come to you instead of going to Google for the same purpose, you won't see adoption. Google has such an advantage not because of their market position, but because of the huge amount of person-years they've spent developing their product.
If you're privacy first, that's great, but you are competing with DDG not Google. Privacy doesn't keep users coming back. Build a better product, people will come.
And that starts with letting your users search how they want to search, not how you want them to.
Agree with all the other commenters. I'm not necessarily against eventually downloading the plugin or changing my navbar setting, but, to be blunt, there is no way in hell I'm doing that before I get to try it out. I'm not going to trust you until you've given some evidence that you're worth trusting. Especially since your tagline is "built for devs", in my experience devs are the least likely to put up with unnecessary hoops and user hostile gates in order to try out a product.
DuckDuckGo seens to have been able to do this just fine, even with the weirdest name for a company ever. Their growing by word of mouth from geeks like us. I set DDG as default on all of my family/friends browsers. Focus on making a good search and users will come
Gabriel (the founder of DDG) wrote a fabulous book (called Traction) on growth.
Tl;dr is that it was much more than just word of mouth. They have been very deliberate and methodical about growth from the very beginning and employed many different growth tactics throughout the lifetime of the company.
Well, to be complete, DDG also advertises on radio, on streaming, on billboards, and in newspapers. I think TV is the only place I haven't seen a DDG ad.
No, but when they first launched they needed 5,000 users to grow 10%, now they need 5M(?) to grow the same? So investing in other means is probably necessary.
Actually I saw a ddg ad on TV. I started rolling my eyes thinking it was a Google ad lying about privacy but was pleasantly surprised by the duck logo.
Having the extension and letting people try it on the web seems like a more reasonable choice. People need to try it out.
That said...there is a search textbox at the top of the page and it worked for me in Firefox and Chrome. Did people just miss it? If so, it should probably be in the middle with the big blue button.
it takes 5 seconds to install and uninstall an extension.
we will open source it also so people can see how simple and benign it is.
It feels like 5s to help move the internet away from a privacy invading monopoly isn't too bad?
If you like privacy and agency of your information diet, or saving lots of time while coding, or Reddit results always accessible to browse for most queries, etc.
Then the 5s install will be worth it for you :)
PS: You can try in incognito mode (though some apps wont work due to hardcore privacy and no location sharing, etc.)
You've got this super expensive domain for a new project, it's normal for tech people to be wary.
Please could you quit thinking we're idiots with that 33kb bit you're doing? We get it, it's fine and safe and beautiful. Right now. We live in 4 dimensions though bud. We don't just care what it does now, we care what it'll be doing next year too!
From my point of view this extension doesn't need to be installed. Therefore I assume it will almost certainly update and fuck me over one day, you will need to monetise eventually and this feels like it's being defended super heavily for no reason
What's the plan here? It's only 5s now sure, how much time is it going to cost when the plot reveals itself?
Your onboarding is too intense mate. HN has fallen out of your funnel because of this extension. It's too weird of a scenario to the point I actually trust you less having read your responses! Where there's smoke there's fire and this extension is giving off all sorts of funky smells
Also someone needs to mention it - I don't want to change my search engine right now. Just be a search engine, quit being so needy! It took like 5 years for me to switch from Google to DDG lmao, you don't get first dibs on my search data like this. Ease into it
That is incredibly dismissive of legitimate feedback, and you should honestly be ashamed of your response. I personally find your attitude in these comments to be absolutely reprehensible, and will never use this site -- or anything you're involved with.
You're apparently not even aware that every browser has the ability to add a keyword to the search engines, so that users could type "you: search phrase" and it goes to your site. Being oblivious to this is a huge red flag, and betrays that you really haven't thought this through.
I think you are kind of missing the point. Regardless of the reasons, people do not want to install an extension from an unknown provider to test out a search engine (at least on HN), you’ll even get a very hostile response.
If you aim to make your search engine a success, regardless of your reasons for that. You’ll have to deal with that problem. Trying to convince people with some idealistic talk does not seem to be working from what I can see in this thread (and anyway, is not scalable).
Alternatively, you can try launching somewhere else, but I imagine the reception on Reddit will be just as hostile.
I already have privacy from Startpage and DuckDuckGo. What I don't have is personal knowledge of whether your search engine is any damn good. Until I find out, I'm not likely to install your extension.
(And fwiw, I use Startpage every day without needing an extension for it.)
Forcing users to install some random extension to use a privacy search engine is probably the worst value prop you can offer. What is the subset of privacy seeking users are part of the group of users willing to install random extensions exist?
I get how useful it is for growth but a defensive answer like this does more PR harm than good. also misses the question.
i have tried your search engine and it is great. i can tell a lot of work has gone into it, but i had to think twice about giving it a second go after being put off by your first impression.
It takes less than 5 seconds to upload personal data to a server from a compromised extension.
Not saying you're doing this but it was the first threat scenario that came to mind and it's not even something particularly uncommon in the browser extension world.
I'm going to go ahead and say it then, this is suspicious as fuck.
It would have been slightly less suspicious if the response to "this is a security concern" would have been "oops yeah we see that now, let's disable that requirement until we gain some trust first".
I do not trust a company that brands itself as privacy-oriented when they insist on peddling a security vulnerability to their users "because Google is evil so trust us". Google may be selling my data but at least they have a lot to lose so they are likely to abide by legal guardrails.
Especially since there is no value-add to the extension. It's whole purpose is to make it harder for less tech-savvy users to stop using the service.
Maybe a compromise would be keeping the button to install the extension but add a link along the lines of "Don't want an extension?" that explains how you can use it without installing the extension and your reasons for the extension.
I can see that private mode isn't enabled by default. What's the point haha, you've already set a tracking cookie by the time I've found the option to enable it
> We also found that many people will just do a quick search for "asd" or "weather" and then leave because those searches aren't really differentiated (and just can't really be).
This is an interesting point, I've seen other apps tackling this issue providing different pre-defined use cases that you can just click to use them. For example, online apps where you can upload a photo and get a somehow tweaked version of it (like cartooning your face or something like that), so users that want to give it a quick try can click on pre-uploaded pictures from a list and see results.
For this case maybe providing a good handful of search use cases where users wanting to give it a quick try could just click and see results could work to keep them away of dumb queries.
We tried sth similar a while back and it confused some people who thought that the entire site could only be used for the 3 examples we provided.
Other users just clicked out of it.
Maybe we can find a way to bring that back without interrupting any flow :)
I appreciate the reply and opportunity to open dialog. I think the flaw in that reasoning is that you're not talking specifically about people for whom search is a problem. Someone searching for the weather forecast, or something that strongly references a Wikipedia article, is already getting a good search experience. People like me, on the other hand, are power users of Google but consistently struggle to quickly find information.
I downloaded the extension so I could reciprocate with useful feedback. First let me say I appreciate the minimal design, although it would be nice if my re-ordering and configuration of the interface remained the same between searches (if I hit the arrows to push Stack Overflow results to the top, every subsequent search pushes it down to a random position). I ran some of my Google searches from earlier today - one was "typescript define class as type", since I didn't really know exactly how to describe the TS syntax I wanted. The second Google result was to a Stack Overflow answer that effectively resolved my query - this answer isn't in the SO results when I searched on You, and the overall search experience for that one isn't great. Obviously that is an edge case with imprecise wording, but it's the best example I could come up with for why it's hard to ditch Google (even though many of us want to).
I ran some other queries where You was actually a much better experience - I was searching for a specific JS library (Nunjucks) and entering queries like "nunjucks define a filter" - the Google results start with a link to the documentation, followed by endless low-quality blog posts. On You, I could easily scroll through and see that people are talking on Reddit about the library - right now I effectively do the same thing on Google by adding "site:news.ycombinator.com" before a query.
Again, appreciate the reply and look forward to following your progress. I am sure that even the naysayers here can agree that it would be nice to see an end to search monopolization :)
Edit: FYI, to add to the argument against the Chrome extension, the moment I navigated to google.com I got a prompt with "yes" as the default answer for switching back to Google as the default search. So I really don't think fighting the search monopoly in this way is going to be easy - to echo another commenter, DuckDuckGo has managed to build a successful business off great search results alone.
Best growth hack: add a link to Google below your first results page. That way, more people will use your engine as their first choice, because they can easily fall back on their previously preferred search engine.
I can't emphasize the parent's comment enough. Being able to look through a set of results and then quickly get Google results if I don't find what I'm looking for are key to getting me to try any other search engine (For historical reference, this is how Excel killed Lotus 123 a few decades ago - by making it super easy to do Lotus exports from Excel so that people who tried Excel didn't feel like they were "trapped" into being outside of the Lotus 123 ecosystem at the time).
I saw the Google link you mentioned, but (at least on mobile) it didn't stand out. I would at least try doing a test where you put something super prominent up at the top of results: "Didn't find what you're looking for? Try your search on Google instead."
I agree with your sentiment about being the default engine to break people free of google, but do you have evidence that the browser extension is the way to get people to do that?
On the other side, you have a search bar on the page, so I'm not exactly sure what people are complaining about.
If you open it up in Chrome, then first off the main search bar in the middle of the screen turns into a button to install the extension.
There remains a search bar in the upper left hand corner of the screen, but if you actually search, no search results are given. Instead the result page is replaced by a link to install the Chrome extension. So effectively, as far as I can tell, on a normal Chrome browsing session there is no way to actually use the search functionality without installing the extension.
This does not seem to happen on other browsers or in incognito mode.
It is a 5 second install or uninstall.
Tbh, the browser extension is the best method for now but it's clearly not where we want to stay.
Even after you install it and make a search from the navbar, Google will encourage you to change it back to Google and make the default button change the setting back.
We hope to eventually be an option in the default search engines list.
Eventually, maybe antitrust will encourage browsers to provide a randomly ordered list of search engines to choose from.
I think the mob has spoken Richard. You can't force people to install the extension, and I think devs are both more likely to work with browser extensions, and less likely to install them.
You've clearly put a lot of great work into the tech. I suggest you sit down with a marketing person to help you figure out how to get people using it. NOT HOW TO GET IT IN FRONT OF PEOPLE. Those are two different things. If the best thing your marketing person can come up with is to have a browser extension, get a better marketing person.
Start small and expand. Perhaps your browser extension is your start small. If so, then it just isn't for me, and that's ok. Maybe you've got a plan of how you grow.
As an example, look at DDG. They started small, and grew, and grew, and grew. They didn't need an extension to do it.
Of course you want everyone to use it, and you want everyone to use it today. But that's not the choice.
I sincerely hope you find your 1,000 true fans, and that those fans can lead you to 1,000,000,000x more.
the truth is that most users have no other easily accessible way for them to switch away from a monopoly that sells them, their data and privacy to the highest bidder and requires all companies to pay a tax to exist in the online economy...
if you are an expert, you can change your settings manually and hence not require the extension.
Sorry, I went to make a search without the extension installed (because I did try) and I got hit with a full screen error message saying I needed to install the extension.
My mistake was obviously typing in the search bar at the top of the screen. I should have edited the address in the address bar manually. If you don’t have the extension installed, the search bar serves only to take you to an ad to install it.
A UI element that appear to be a search box but is actually an ad for your extension, I would characterize as user hostile design.
Google’s practices, if you don’t agree with them, doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you want because you’re the little guy. Offering an extension is fine. But disabling searching if the extension isn’t installed is not helpful.
Yeah when I tried a search and got that "download our extension" message, my immediate gut reaction was that it was trying to hack me. If I hadn't started from HN, I'd have been convinced of it, closed the browser immediately, and never gone back.
Respectfully: because nobody knows who the fuck you are, and your reasoning doesn't make sense.
You want to offer a privacy focused search service, but the users need to install an extension because otherwise <some gibberish about google evil here> instead of just having a regular web frontend for the masses to try. Then it's too hard for lusers to switch; you created this problem for yourself.
The more you respond, the more it looks like this is some poorly thought out lead capture, or you're so focused on the service you don't understand the broader security concerns.
You broke the site guidelines with this comment. Putting "respectfully" in front of something disrespectful does not make it ok.
It's particularly important not to pile on someone when they're presenting their own work—the Show HN guidelines have additional rules about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
I don't see anything disrespectful in that comment; it was made entirely in good faith.
That concept becomes tricky in situations like this, because you're assuming bad faith, and then tone policing based off that. My point of view is that you got it wrong this time, but that doesn't really matter, you're the one with the hammer, boss. o7
Fwiw, HN needs an alert/messaging system of some kind to deliver these moderation messages to users. If I don't see you responded in an official capacity before I post enough to push it to second page of my profile, I may never see it, which means it's not serving it's entire purpose. The public signaling part works, but the direct signaling could easily get lost. I know usually you aren't doing this a day later, but in those cases, there's gotta be a better solution.
You packed so many swipey phrases into your comment ("nobody knows who the fuck you are", "<some gibberish about google evil here>", "you created this problem for yourself", "the more you respond", "this is some poorly thought out", "you don't understand") that the post came across as something between a harangue and an outright an attack. This is not a good way to communicate respectfully on the internet. (Doubly so in the context of a mass pile-on, which is what this thread became.)
I believe you that you wrote your post in good faith, but intentions aren't enough. All too often, a comment comes out in a way that doesn't at all make its good intent clear, and damaging effects don't become less when the damage is unintentional. Therefore the burden falls on the commenter to disambiguate intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
(Yes, it's on the list to eventually build a better way of signaling moderation to accounts. I'm sure there is a much better solution.)
and then this subthread, where we're having this conversation after dinging me.
The OP didn't disclose the requirement of a browser extension. The linked site didn't function in two out of three browsers, and prompted extension installs on Chrome. It was also breaking in user tests.
The users responded as they did. When the extension requirement became the core topic, OP rotated between multiple reasons for why, including some rather bad generalizations about google being a $2trn company, users not being smart enough to switch the default search provider, and almost-but-not-quite admitting it's user capture.
They were back in the other thread debating back and forth, and called out about dishonesty in regards to more of their product claims since. They also removed the extension requirement.
Where were you?
You dinged me, a day later, but never said a word to OP about the need to disclose unexpected software installation requirements for a search service? You allowed them to post, in two separate threads, and market their product with dark patterns.
That's how pile-on's happen, Dan. The product didn't work as submitted, as it required an undisclosed software installation on only one browser, and didn't function at all on others.
Did you test the landing page before sticking their promotional comment?
Did you test it at all?
Do you verify any of the submissions?
If so, why didn't you verify this one?
Why are Show submissions allowed to promote their products with dark patterns?
The people that care about this community's fellow members rightly piled on, because you weren't doing anything about it. This is not the first time this situation has happened. That pile-on is the public screaming warnings to those who might be unaware of potential danger.
Good faith says you just missed the context because you're swamped, I get it man.
When you start dictating what other peoples words mean, without context, and trying to redefine their communication styles to fit your preferred format, on top of the perspective I just shared; How do you think that looks?
I think your approach on this, from the initial submission up, is either disingenuous or careless. I think you fired from the hip, based on my comment, and didn't do anything to actually address, or understand, the cause of the issues in this thread, or the other one.
I'm sure you have a lot of good points in here but I don't see anything that changes the specific moderation issue that I was posting about, that your comment went against the site guidelines.
A couple points of clarification in case it's useful:
I pinned https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29165602 to the top of the thread because that's standard moderation practice for Show HNs. When people post an introductory blurb about the project they're presenting, we pin it to the top (assuming we see it!) and turn off replies. There are two reasons: one is that the introductory blurb is really a companion piece to the original submission and therefore belongs at the top. The other is that people often reply to that blurb with general feedback about the project, which (most likely unintentionally) is a kind of topjacking, i.e. it privileges their response higher up on the page, relative to other users who post general feedback in the thread at large. By turning off replies to the blurb comment, we're treating the blurb as part of the original submission and putting all user responses on a level playing field. It's a nice solution! Sorry for the long explanation (no time to make it shorter &c).
As for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29167680 — I never post anything by script! I do have a lot of keyboard shortcuts in my mod-client-browser-extension to help speed things up. But all posts are done manually. I don't think it would be in the spirit of HN to do otherwise.
The first part of your opening sentence is demonstrative of my point, followed by both explanations. You manually touched the thread 3 times, and did nothing to verify or proactively protect the community, but speech you missed the context on is actionable. You've responded to me multiple times, but you still haven't done anything to correct the problem we were all addressing.
..and yeah, I disagree, as I did originally. I think you're being intellectually dishonest here now. So that's three shades.
The analog to 'because I said so' in the world of tools, is a hammer. As I said, it's your hammer, swing it or don't, but spare me the links to your own search results about communication when you aren't actually participating genuinely.
You aren't communicating in good faith now, Dan. You're speaking through a communication framework, using conversational tactics. Those tools are wonderful when used to better ones own communication: be aware it becomes manipulation when used as a control on other's. This isn't confrontational, this is just direct and purposeful dialect.
Let's run this back, and this is the last time I'm engaging with you on this specific topic.
I said what I said, you responded that I broke the guidelines, and accused me of disrespect. Respect is a currency earned in grave experiences, to me. I understand you don't know that, but as a policy in this world: quickly questioning someones respect can be inflammatory. For clarity: Everything I say to you is with respect, care, and purpose.
I responded that it wasn't disrespectful, and voiced my disagreement.
You responded to that by cherry picking and scare-quoting collections of words, irrespective of the context of the entire comment, and flow of the conversation at the time.
That's against the spirit of HN: you already know this. The framework you're communicating through: seeking clarity, I don't understand, etc; entirely disingenuous when you actually know better. You violated the rules to make a point, while trying to tone police me, and coach me on how to communicate in a style you prefer.
Respectfully: "nobody knows who the fuck you are"
Absolute truth with levity, as a combined response to several posts by the OP repeatedly responding with incredulity that everyone wasn't happy to install an undisclosed extension while they advertised a search engine service on a website. It's an entirely obvious and honest response.
"<some gibberish about google evil here>"
Levity, brevity, and actually a small kindness. [1][2][3][4][5] Those are just the google related comments. To expound: that's childish circular logic, manipulative talking points, immature tribalism: gibberish is not out of bounds here. This isn't a garage project, this is a corporate venture with major backing; the second thread using other's names as social currency. Poor communication style: avoidant, defensive, while being deceptive: what about guidelines? Respect the house.
Follow the thread, I refuse to engage with you when you're choosing to ignore conversational flow. They created the undisclosed requirement, the requirement was the most mentioned complaint: they created this problem. That is not a slap, it's a valid observation, and an opportunity to adapt early. Which they have, despite some other questionable ongoing issues.
"the more you respond"
Read my last response, and follow the conversation, they reverted to repeating the same meaningless statements.
"this is some poorly thought out"
They marketed a search service hosted on a website, without disclosing the extension requirement: and further we sink into your missing context; it was user capture.
"you don't understand"
His job title is CEO; is it proper form to question a CEO about deployments, or do we live in world where people have domain expertise in specific fields? Again, you fired from the hip without paying attention to context. Your bias, as I pointed out originally, intellectual dishonesty, and not in the spirit of HN.
If I hadn't made it clear, I'm taking the ding either way. It's your house, but at some point you need to ask yourself if your tao of communication became the site guidelines over time.
Then the actual major issue, that you refuse to acknowledge or engage on: predatory marketing and dark patterns in Show submissions, and your inaction in regards to them. This topic is going to come up again, as it predates this thread. This is a community concern.
Best interpretation is just a mistake, fully respective of workload and personal life. That's great, maybe then you and the community can have a conversation about better processes and ways for us to respond and we can build a solution together. Perfect is an enemy of good just as good enough is an enemy of better. Maintain the house respect.
The only alternative is you're complicit, and intellectually honest reasoning: company policy, employment requirements, etc. This is one of those binary things; the shades of grey begin after the fork.
Disambiguate intent: agreed; now, please. You mentioned damage, and here we are. We can disagree about the tree, and let it be, but I'm also talking about the seemingly untended fire in the forest.
Like I said, I respect the house, I respect the mission, I respect you and the
work you do. You quote the show guidelines, they broke the show guidelines: you quote the house guidelines, you break the site guidelines; practice what you proselytize. Do as I say, not as I do is near the peak of intellectual dishonesty. Securing the flock is a shepherds first job responsibility.
I get it. There are tons of sketchy extensions.
We'll open source our extension so you can see the entire 33kB that's needed to make one settings change.
Also, you can try it out in incognito mode or change those settings manually and hence give it a try :)
But most people need the simplicity and convenience of a few clicks in order to give it a proper try.
bruh, i use a chromium-based browser which doesn't support extensions (or an incognito mode) as of this moment. i ain't installing chrome just for some stupid setting, just saying.
There does seem to be a regular web front end, you.com. The link in the HN post was to a search for you.com on you.com. There's also a search bar at the top of that 'results' page.
Edit: I now believe the website was, in fact, changed.
Original comment below, most individual bits still relevant aside from the overall conclusion that the pieces added up to accidental confusion. Apparently concluding HN folk were bad at understanding even poorly displayed tech was not wise. Who knew? I probably should have realized that was not a good bet.
At this point I consider the apparent lack of understanding from the OP willful ignorance at best. All this seems like kind of a waste now. Oh well.
---
Unless the website was recently changed (final edit: yeah... unless...), I think the problem here is a combination of the link that was submitted and uh... excessively effective design, if I want to put it nicely. You're doing too good a job of directing attention to the extension, and people are missing the actual means of using your website.
Right now the link is https://you.com/search?q=you.com&fromSearchBar=true. That page currently has a little search bar in the top UI bar which is prefilled with a search term, and the contrast that identifies it as a text input is pretty minimal. Dark Reader further hides that fact with some elements like the 'x' in the input not getting adjusted to be more visible. These aspects make it extremely easy to overlook as a text input. My first instinct is to ignore it as part of the wasted space in the top bar, and it does a poor job of standing out as anything else.
Furthermore the banner for the extension is pretty freaking huge and draws all the attention. The copy on it also pretty strongly implies you need it to use the website.
The multiple comments from other HN folk that have clearly been mislead about the importance of the extension further feeds that perception. I'm sure some people haven't even actually checked for themselves - I know I almost didn't. It also wasn't immediately obvious to me what was going on once I did visit the submitted page, and I nearly fell into the same trap.
Meanwhile https://you.com/ offers a much more familiar design that does not contain so many opportunities for confusion. I think you may have been better off submitting that.
While I'm at it, I have few other thoughts. I continually find myself expecting many of the non-ads to be ads. I keep ignoring them or even getting annoyed with them, until I remind myself I should look again. This happens on both the submitted page with the various blurbs/links down at the bottom and the search results page. My very first response to attempting a search was essentially a dismissive and annoyed eyeroll as I thought you'd tried to load up an entire screen full of ads.
I'm not entirely sure what the whole problem is. I'd guess it's partly being conditioned by other search providers about the very top 'results' and partly the overall style. Maybe grids of little boxes with so-perfectly-rounded corners and strong titles just seem like ads to me. On the submitted page, I'm sure having a bunch of company names there in the Media section doesn't help.
Again, this is just my immediate impression of the UI elements. I don't believe them to actually be ads, but I'm constantly having to fight my instincts to treat them otherwise.
Which browser are you using? Firefox appears to be not getting the agressive prompt to install the Chrome extension, they were clever enough to check for that.
I might install an extension. I have the DuckDuckGo Privacy extension for instance, and use DDG as my primary search engine. But I use Firefox, and it doesn't seem like this company provides a Firefox addon.
It's an interesting choice to launch a search engine, give reasons for using it instead of Google, but also play into the Google quasi-monopoly by not providing a Firefox addon. Hopefully it's coming soon.
Yea... Requiring the extension for navbar searches was a tough choice.
You actually can try it out in incognito mode and any other browser. But we found that without the convenience of a navbar search, most people won't give it a proper try either way.
I hope we can drop this requirement even in Chrome when we become one of the default options.
We will implement an a/b test and see if we can get rid of the requirement even earlier.
If you set your search engine default to https://you.com manually in Chrome with "https://you.com/search?q=%s" you will not need the extension... but for most people convenience wins and well...
It's tough to go up against a monopoly that controls the browser too?
that's it. very easy if you're technical.
of course, we don't want to block our users.
we are just trying to make it convenient and easy to have navbar searches - we found that if you're not in the navbar yngmi..
> very easy if you're technical. of course, we don't want to block our users. we are just trying to make it convenient and easy to have navbar searches
FWIW this comes off as very hollow. Your responses elsewhere seem to suggest you are doing this because you think you need the level of stickiness installing an extension implies to compete with Google (presumably to build out a small but fervent base of initial users who use you.com fanatically) and you therefore need to forcefully prod users into installing the extension. Therefore you're intentionally putting in friction on the casual usage path to really capture that initial core audience.
That sounds fine to me if stated like that. The way you stated it here leaves a bad taste in my mouth, akin to when some companies give extremely flowery, ostensibly user-centric justifications for why prices are being raised (the answer is the company doesn't think its current profits are high enough, and often won't survive with the lower prices, which is reason enough, not anything to do with helping users directly).
You're a startup. You need to get a core group of sticky users and you're introducing friction to do that. I understand that. You don't need to justify it in other language.
EDIT: Removed "cloak" and replaced with "justify" because that's rather unfair of me to say it was cloaking.
>we don't want to block our users. we are just trying to make it convenient and easy to have navbar searches
You are, quite literally, blocking potential users by putting a wall up in front of your search engine instead of trusting them to just remember to search at "you.com". Your workarounds are just more walls (opening an incognito window, adding URL parameters, etc) that aren't feasible: if you don't trust someone to remember "you.com", they're definitely not going to remember to also add `&fromSearchBar=false` to their queries.
It comes off as user-hostile. It makes me think you think so little of me (or other users) that I need my hand held through changing my search engine. I don't, and I don't appreciate a search engine treating me like I'm stupid.
I'm not going to tell you your business, but you're not improving your 'making it' quotient by adding a piece of middleware to the process.
At best, it's subtly hostile. At worst, it's highly annoying and increases my threat surface by introducing Yet Another Browser Extension that is exceedingly vulnerable to supply chain attacks.
yes, you can just go into incognito mode.
we care a lot about privacy so we didn't want to mess with that.
it should just work when you're in incognito mode.
if you then also go into private mode - you'll have the MOST privacy preserving search experience that we know of, certainly even better than DDG:
Here's our blog post about how we think about the privacy-convenience tradeoff:
I'd wager most people wouldn't want to install your extension before 2 searches, to see if it's even worth using.
A handful of searches seems entirely reasonable to test out a service before downloading an extension that only exists to change your default settings to use it.
I'd definitely be more likely to download an extension for something I'm already using than I am to download an extension for something I've never even seen in use.
Honestly, I won't install your extension because I don't know who you are. Having it as an option would be great. People here have seen _many_ stories about extensions being silently updated with malware.
I really hope you reconsider. So far I've got great results for the queries I ran in Incognito mode, but I will not install an extension just so I can change my search engine.
I don't know if I want to use your search engine, it is literally impossible for me to set it as my homepage and use it casually. I really wish I could give it a proper chance, but your tacit denial of what is obviously bad design has come back to bite you in the butt. You're making the exact same mistakes the Brave browser did, if you don't back down on a feature that the majority of users are telling you to change, you'll have a hard time proselytizing in the future.
yeah, i installed the extension and it immediately mucked with my chrome profiles. thanks, but no thanks. glad i'm not the only one that felt this way.
Hrm, I think it's your team being ignorant of a bug.
Other extensions do not move around my profiles at all upon install and usage, only this app.
Wasn't just a security thing, but a huge inconvenience I don't want to happen again, so I just uninstalled. As you can read, I'm not the only user that feels this way/has this experience.
EDIT: I see now that ya'll changed it so the extension is no longer needed. Nice work. The app is pretty cool! It might already be a feature I haven't found yet - but I wish I could filter (or sort) by date. I look up a lot of stocks and articles that are > 3 months old (and sometimes even >1 mos old) are not of value.
I'm confused. If you go to you.com there is a search field right there just like every other search site. No extension is needed to try it. Why do you say you aren't allowed to search without the extension?
Thanks, that explains it as I use Firefox. That is surely a very odd decision to have it fail to with Chrome/Chromium without a plugin. I can see why it'd make people a bit suspicious as there is no reason for it other than to force the use of a plugin when it isn't necessary.
Well, that's fine, but all the issues being reported here are due to Chrome users seeing the same thing - inability to use You.com unless you install an even larger potential privacy killer in the form of an extension. Otherwise it refuses to let you search using the on page bar.
Not all extensions are the same.
I understand healthy skepticism since there are a ton of sketchy extensions out there.
We will open source it in the next few hours since 80% of comments here are just about this extension :D
It's 33kB and a dead simple change in one setting.
Yeah, I've been playing with it all day, and this thread was is only place i heard about an extension- it sounds like its if you want to make it the default on chrome when you type search terms into the navigation bar
It's also pretty telling that all of these complaints are coming based on what appears to be a workaround for Google's attempt to lock you into their search when you use their browser.
I've had access to You.com and I can attest that the initial experience is good. The search results are on point, the layout of those results is flexible and fresh.
In contrast, when I use an engine like Google, the ads often cover the first five slots, or the totality of my phone's screen...
yea i'm not going to install an extension. but actually you CAN try it with the little text box at the top.
took me a second look to find it. the spammy design doesn't actually make it obvious. kinda like yahoo's clutter vs google's minimalist homepage all over again.
Sorry it came off as hostile.
Lots of bad extensions out there. Ours only has write access to one setting field. No read access. Chrome tells you.
But we dropped it entirely so you can try it out any way you like :)
Thanks for your feedback.
If your search engine requires an extension to work and display the results, it's a total non-starter. Cannot suggest this to any non-HN crowd. Good luck.
You actually can try it out in incognito mode and any other browser. But we found that without the convenience of a navbar search, most people won't give it a proper try either way.
I hope we can drop this requirement even in Chrome when we become one of the default options.
If you set your search engine default to http://you.com manually in Chrome with "https://you.com/search?q=%s" you will not need the extension... but for most people convenience wins and well...
It's tough to go up against a monopoly that controls the browser too?
I get that and appreciate that this was a tough choice, but the alternative you're proposing (1) requires several more clicks, (2) expects the end user to trust an extension that is unknown to them at the onset, and (3) does not provide an intuitive way for the average user to know they can use incognito to try it out.
You have an extremely memorable URL and in my view, the quality and accuracy of the results should naturally help spread the word for you if you do indeed provide a compelling alternative.
I'm sorry, I just don't buy your argument about "monopoly and controlling the browser" when you don't require an extension for those using Firefox, Edge, etc. - yet you _hope_ that Google will still add you to the default list of search engines.
>> It's tough to go up against a monopoly that controls the browser too?
So the idea was to force people using Chromium/Chrome to install an extension, driving off a huge percentage of power users with the hopes that the every day person (who couldn't even tell you what search engine they use) will adopt the extension without questioning it?
I don't think this is a tough choice. I think it was one you didn't think through at all.
We don't even know. It's not made public anywhere :(
Hence our extension requirement for the time being.
At least Chromium-based browsers have 5 second extension install/uninstall options whereas in Safari it's several minutes and so many clicks, we didn't even bother trying to build the extension.
I had a go for a ‘dev’ related search. I just tried one trivial thing.
I searched for ‘jq modify value’ as it’s something I previously found hard to find skimming the enormous man page. I got:
1. A stack overflow question which implicitly answered the question but was actually about someone wanting to modify a file in-place.
2. A blog post from Monsanto. I clicked on it and I was greeted with a big model box that I didn’t read.
3. Something from w3 schools (which unlike stack overflow seems to get first class treatment in the results) about css and jquery.
4. Some “generated code” that was totally crazy looking python full of comments in Chinese.
5. A video that looked like it might contain the answer
6. A box asking me to sign into GitHub.
I clicked the G icon for Google and the first result was a stack overflow question about how to modify a field with jq. The top answer was sane but there were some weird comments on it (the answer to the question in the You.com results had good constructive comments). I didn’t look at the later results which is unfair as the first result from You.com also contained the answer.
It seems to me that it must be extremely hard to break into this space. Microsoft tried (including building entirely their own indexes and suchlike) and, roughly speaking, failed despite often producing high quality results that bettered Google. Any bad results from an upstart send people back to Google. Bad results from Google send them back to the search box to try again. I can’t blame them for wanting people to set the app as a chrome default with extra extension-powered abilities.
Personally I also find it weird to be connecting ‘private’ search with other accounts. I guess it is private+personalised but I’m not sure I really want personalised.
Maybe things would be different for other queries.
You say that you don't store any information to ensure privacy but this is essentially asking users to trust you. Why not build trust into the technology from the outset? Or have I missed something and that is what you've done? Barring that, what actions do you intend to take to ensure data is kept private (external audit, etc)?
You also say this is open source. I didn't look all that hard but could you provide a link to the associated repositories and mention what license it's under? Also, when you say "open source", do you mean the code only or are you providing data to the community as well?
Also, I'm not sure the claim "world's first open source engine platform" is really accurate. I don't claim to have any big insight into what the various "tiers" of search engine there are (code, data, aggregation?) but I see at least one list that looks to have many FOSS alternatives to Google search [0].
Could you go into what's novel about You.com compared to other FOSS alternatives?
"You say that you don't store any information to ensure privacy but this is essentially asking users to trust you. Why not build trust into the technology from the outset?"
I am also working on a project where users can optionally self-store their data (at the cost of making what I hope are useful algorithms dumber). I'm sort of banking on the hope that 90% of users won't care, and the ten percent that do care will appreciate that option and become enthusiasts.
I'm curious what Richard's answer to the trust question is, but also what you (@abetusk) mean by "build trust into the technology by the outset"? Even when open sourcing everything, there is the question of, "are you actually using that branch on the servers?" I don't know how to answer that.
> I'm curious what ... you ... mean by "build trust into the technology by the outset"?
I'm not sure I could come up with a checklist that would take all the considerations in mind, so it's an ill defined question in some sense. For folks who market their product as "secure" and "privacy conscious", I would hope they would have thought about these questions and come up with a solution. At the very least, I would hope they would be able to list out their assumptions and limitations of whatever solution they came up with.
To try and actually answer the question, though, I would think something along the lines of queries that are Tor enabled or have an option to allow for Tor connections (without the need for Javascript). Maybe something that uses distributed data/queries for decentralization and resiliency against snooping or attacks on a central location?
It looks like You.com uses a chrome extension, so they should have more control over what form the queries take. Connection to the Tor network is presumably not out of the question.
I agree that knowing what code is running where is a hard problem in general but besides being able to audit code that's open source, the other leg of that is to be able to stand up your own instance. There could be a way to provide incentives for people to return "good" results by random verification and/or user (transparent/frictionless/micro) payments.
There are fancier systems like homomorphic encryption but I'm not sure those are really ready for everyday use yet.
The amount of data is massive and any search service is going to be competing with a corporation that has 20+ years of domain knowledge and a compute infrastructure that is many orders of magnitude larger than anything that's really available, so I'm not sure there are any easy answers, which is why I'm asking.
Maybe You.com is focusing on a more AI centric search service, which is how they're trying to compete or differentiate themselves? If so, then making that data available (under a libre/free license) along with the code would go a long way towards building good will and cold lead to a path for a "trustless" community built search engine.
Beyond what others have mentioned about requiring the Chrome extension, I would strongly recommend altering the language in FAQ - "How do I make You.com my default search engine?"
It vaguely references "the monopoly" in ominous tones. This comes across as petulant and distracting. Just focus on the instructions to set it as the default and how to respond to questions that try to change it back.
Congratulations on the launch! I think am getting better results than on any other engine I've tried using experimentally. Nice and sneaky job ad too in the console.
As for some downsides I felt that:
1. The page is too heavy for my everyday use. On my phone initial load is 10 seconds, searches are 15 seconds. During that time the screen is just blank, so at first try I thought it doesn't work on mobile. It almost seems like it loads all the results at once, summary, image, video etc?
2. On desktop it's snappier, but still 3-4 seconds despite having good connection/system.
3. Skeletal loaders are everywhere. I know they are popular these days, but for me searching multiple times in a row to narrow down results started to feel a bit dizzying with them popping up each time and swirling. Same thing bothers me on Qwant search engine for example and is the main (although shallow) reason I don't use it.
Requiring a plugin to use a search engine is the dumbest thing I have seen in a while. It is insane. How did anyone think this was a good idea? How was this funded?
This creepy and weird!
I was frustrated when this popup appeared and will never use this. Its left negative feelings, I will strongly resist you dot com forever.
Congratulations on the beta launch! I am all for privacy-friendly search engines.
My 2-cents is default to the familiar list view for search results. The current card-view makes it cumbersome to navigate (horizontal and vertical scroll) and scanning screen-width end-to-end. And with my penchant to serially browse results, it can result in me over-spending time to find what I need. Also, it would force you to have a tighter ranking of results. The current view could still be an option.
Yea. We debated this one for a while.
There's a "regression to the mean" type of thing going on where every other search engine in the last 20 years just looks like a Google knockoff.
We found that many different types of users love the new layout. It allows you zoom into one dimension of your search, e.g. lots of Reddit results or Medium articles and then also quickly skip to the next.
It will work well on mobile too (though we're focused on desktop for now) where many users are used to scrolling left/right and up/down in e.g. Instagram.
Depending on your input device, it can be more or less intuitive:
Worst case is folks with a single scroll wheel mouse. There you need to use shift+scroll wheel to move horizontally (that actually works in every app and OS).
With trackpads and touch screens it's a lot easier.
For some the layout is busy but especially developers told us they like the higher information density a lot and can avoid opening 20 different tabs to find what they're looking for.
That being said, I understand that it will take some time to adjust to something new and a less-Google-y future.
I understand the concept, but there have been several search engines that return a richer UI, the name "Clusty" comes to mind among others, and Google did not invent the relevance-sorted list, just [famously] improved relevancy.
The problem is that the majority of users will likely bounce right off of such a foreign interface and never come back. Personally, I won't even consider this search engine until there's a less chaotic way to view the results.
I installed the plugin and it instantly mucked up my chrome profiles. It felt very disconcerting and I instantly removed it.
I imagine most users might not have multiple chrome profiles and so wouldn't notice, but for me it was an instant stop.
What are you doing with profiles? Why does it need to be installed as a plugin?
That's a Chrome setting.
We dont change anything in your profile.
I guess folks here have a lot of reasonable doubts about extensions. I get it. I hate them also because many follow you around to all the sites you visit, etc.
Surprisingly nobody mentioned all day that the ONLY permission this app has is to change your navbar setting. Chrome says that so clearly when you install it :)
The reason to install it is to have the convenience of a navbar search. Without it you will try a search or two and depending on what you searched for disappear because it's just not convenient enough to have to load another page every time you want to search.
Not to flog a dead horse here, but your argument is that without the extension people will try it a couple of times and then forget about you.com, and go back to default.
But your target demographic is here telling you that with the extension requirement, they will try it zero times, because they don't want to change their default to a service they haven't tried yet.
A better idea would be to unblock search, show results to everyone regardless of browser defaults, and push hard for the extension install on the search results page once people can see the value prop you're offering.
Requiring people to set you as the default search engine (much less install an extension!) to even try the thing is setting up a barrier to entry large enough to cause most people to nope out. I'd be surprised if your usage stats will improve by shutting down the top of the funnel so completely.
> Without it you will try a search or two and depending on what you searched for disappear because it's just not convenient enough to have to load another page every time you want to search.
Nope, I’ll disappear immediately because it’s just not convenient enough to have to install an extension just to maybe try a search or two.
It does strike me as odd that is private but I need to install a chrome extension to use it and there is a prominent 'Sign up' button on the top right corner.
I am also struggling to understand why the need to install a chrome extension to see search results. Feels like a lot of users will get lost on this first funnel step.
You don't need the extension or sign up to use the search engine, just type into the search bar on the top of the page.
What is raising red flags for me is this part of the FAQ:
> How does You.com make money?
> We are currently focused on building the best possible search experience. We will explore monetization ideas in the future and look forward to your feedback in that process.
So they don't have a monetization strategy yet, and they expect you to sign up and install a browser extension? That's a recipe for disaster right there.
This looks promising, but until the monetization situation is figured out, I'm going to avoid giving them any access to my information.
* You're pitching this search engine specifically "for devs".
* You're pitching it on HN, a community which (correct me if I'm wrong, @dang) is largely composed of your target audience.
* When given feedback, you're responding very defensively in almost 100% of your comments with something akin to "an extension takes 5s to install and uninstall, just do it, no one cares, we don't want to prevent ordinary folk whom we consider morons from using our search engine so everybody has to use our middleware to even give it a try". Buddy, in case you can't see why that's inane, let me help you: you're marketing this as a search engine for devs and devs are telling you why they won't use it. If you can't even get your target audience to give it a try, why on earth do you think the average person (who sadly doesn't give a fig about "the big bad monopoly boogeymen") will spare a glance for your product _if they even hear about it in the first place_? You're defending a user-hostile practice with shallow nonsense logic.
It's been my experience that founders who are seeking to "disrupt a monopoly" by ignoring feedback from their target audience don't end up disrupting anything (unless you count disrupting their employees' lives when the VC money runs out and everyone gets laid off), they just end up alienating anyone who'd ordinarily care enough to give the product a try. Best of luck, though.
He's also gaslighting a crowd of folk that he absolutely had to know will know better[1], and then asks us to trust that his product will respect privacy.
If you're starting a relationship of trust off with such a ballsy, blatant lie, then nothing you say can be trusted going forward.
For real. It makes me wonder what the culture is like for the other people working there. Apparently, they're currently hiring; for their sake, I hope one of the open positions is for someone who can do PR.
Spot on! The OP appears to be so obsessed with taking down a monopoly that he forgot to make a good product, or a good onboarding experience, or to just be a respectable human when interacting with others. He came here to convince the startup and dev community that he's our savior against Google, and then repeatedly told us we're just too stupid to understand what he's trying to accomplish. I find it disgusting.
> [snip] or to just be a respectable human when interacting with others. He came here to convince the startup and dev community that he's our savior against Google, and then repeatedly told us we're just too stupid to understand what he's trying to accomplish. I find it disgusting.
100% agree. Considering how poorly he handles feedback, user concerns, and basic human interaction, I'm very glad I don't work with him. With the quality of his comments and behavior all day, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he was bragging about not having a PR person, either.[1]
Yeah, it would be nice if it was easier to test... so that people could assess whether or not they like it. Instead, we get this hostile experience where we're forced to make it the default search engine before we know if we want to use it.
It's also concerning that they're throwing around "privacy" like a buzzword... but aren't sharing how they plan to monetize the platform in the future. That plus the dark patterns will make it a no-go for me.
The dark patterns, the complete and utter inability to address legitimate feedback appropriately, the excuses, the gaslighting... Yeah, no. I don't need yet another company with these philosophies and this kind of founder in my life.
Especially (from their intro comment, which I can’t reply to for some reason):
> We believe in superior privacy choices without losing convenience.
Their replies in this thread contradict that - both privacy and convenience are compromised in favor of sticky user acquisition, with the founder doubling down on how this is somehow not contradictory, just “unfortunate”.
> Especially (from their intro comment, which I can’t reply to for some reason):
>> We believe in superior privacy choices without losing convenience.
> Their replies in this thread contradicts that - both privacy and convenience are compromised in favor of sticky user acquisition, with the founder doubling down on how this is somehow not contradictory, just “unfortunate”.
Absolutely. That, and constant references to how much of an underdog they are fighting as the peoples' champion against a $2tr Goliath with a browser monopoly that forced them to implement this "unfortunate" requirement. eye roll
I feel really sorry for the people on his team who undoubtedly put a lot of time and effort into this, only to see it being put to waste by the most tone deaf CEO I’ve ever witnessed.
This guy is going to blow the 20 mil trying to get people to download his browser extension instead of actually making a search engine or whatever it's supposed to be
The saddest bit is that when it does end up failing, he will have convinced himself it's because:
1) "competing with a $2tr company is hard"
2) "people were too dumb to be able to immediately make it their default navbar search engine"
3) "We made a super easy extension to let people install it before trying it! We even open sourced it! Clearly, people don't care enough about privacy yet. It's not my philosophy or my PR approach, it's the users that suck. I hope the target audience for my next genius idea isn't as stupid and lazy as this one was!"
Well, that's the problem in the world where everyone expects certain things to be free. Nobody wants to pay for a search engine, so the only way to keep paying the dev salaries and server costs is to sell your data. There's no magic here, just economy.
For goodness' sake, there's a middle ground for making your product sticky that doesn't need people to commit to stop using Google Search without trying your product once!
Let me repeat that - you're asking me to give up Google Search, one of the seven wonders of the online world! Yes, I know, you can still go to google.com. But based on your messaging you clearly understand that a search engine that isn't in the search bar is one that doesn't exist. And maybe you know beyond a doubt that your product is better, but you sure haven't earned that trust with the rest of us yet!
Here is the middle ground: Ask users to add you to their chrome://settings/searchEngines with a one-letter shortcut, so they can search with You by typing "y <searchterm>". You're targeting technical users; we know how to work with hacks like that. There may even be a way to set this up programmatically.
I already have custom search engines set up for language study and Wolfram Alpha, and use them all the time. The evidence that this is effective is that Google seems to have intentionally crippled the keywords for competing search engines in its defaults, despite the known antitrust risks. This is an easy trial option, and if users start using your engine more, you can occasionally nudge them about making you their default.
I've just added you to my one-letter list, because a nice user shared a GET request that showed me your search results, and they seem interesting. And also monopolies are bad for the end user. But the very fact that you're making demands like this implies such a strange thinking about your relationship with users that I've got one foot out the door already.
(Edit: Okay, despite the above, after more tests via one letter shortcut your ideas about search actually do seem very decent. I guess this means Google really does have it too easy at the moment. If this is what ends up fixing your onboarding, remember me when you IPO, please and thank you)
Hey.
Good ideas!
Thanks a bunch. Happy to hear and we listened to you and have now dropped the requirement for the extension entirely.
Excited to hear more of your feedback.
Built for devs? It looks like the exact opposite to me.
The layout has a focus on flashy design and no focus on content. Devs like content.
They talk about "superior privacy" but when you open the network tab you see their serps send queries all over the place. Just on my first serp, I see queries to serpapi.com which is owned by "SerpApi, LLC", to bing.com which is owned by Microsoft, to scdn.co (Spotify?) and to other hosts. As a dev, my impression is that they make no effort at all to keep their users data private. What I see is the complete opposite.
The approach to force the user to install software. Devs know that there is no technical reason for it. And how dangerous and privacy violating this is.
Then the reasoning in the replies here. They say it was a "tough choice" to force software down users throats, but it is a good way to gain market share and helps competing with Google. So their values are growth first, users second. As a dev, my reply is: Leave me alone already!
And it gets worse. The founder here on HN gets the top comment spot fixed with no way to reply? How did they socialize their way into HN to get this special treatment? This is offensive to devs. Devs like to see competition on features. Not on social trickery.
Which search engine doesn't call any
APIs and has great privacy?
This question seems strange to me and makes me think you don't know the difference between API calls on the backend and sending http requests from the users browser?
Go to https://duckduckgo.com/ and open your network tab. You will never see any requests to non-DDG owned websites.
Your site sends requests to all kind of companies. Which exposes data about your users (IP, UserAgent, that they use you.com ...) to those companies.
Right.
Have you tried the private mode (top right dropdown)?
Like DDG we proxy everything in that mode. It's a bit slower so we haven't done it in default mode yet.
It is getting absurd. Having "private" in your marketing front and center and at the same time defaulting to sending your users data out to all kind of companies.
I would not have said anything if you did not post with "private" and "build for devs" in the title. I have no opinion on your project. I only know it is not private and not build for devs. This is just marketing speak and I don't like to see that on my favorite news aggregator.
By the way, have you tried the "private mode"? Even when I enable it, I still see requests to third parties.
If I should take a guess why, I would say because you use external javascript. And even when you proxy that, it can still access external hosts directly. Or your own javascript does not get sanitized correctly. Since JS is turing complete, there can never be a guarantee that your proxy mechanism sanitizes everything.
For example, every time I saw Etsy in the results, my browser made direct requests to Google.
Goddamn, thank you for pointing that out. I knew I was right to not trust him regarding privacy [1], I just didn't expect to see something like this backing that up so quickly lol.
I'd listen to TekMol's feedback and made "private mode" default. Marketing privacy while making the client send traceable queries to third parties severely break user expectations.
There should be no reason why all required queries aren't going to first-party servers.
I heard about "you" from one of my friends and wanted to give it a try and it forced me to install chrome plugin.
This is a lot of friction for me to try a new search engine. Not sure why you'd force your user to install something just to give it a try.
You actually can try it out in incognito mode and any other non-Chromium browser. But we found that without the convenience of a navbar search, most people won't give it a proper try either way.
I hope we can drop this requirement even in Chrome when we become one of the default options.
If you set your search engine default to http://you.com manually in Chrome with "https://you.com/search?q=%s" you will not need the extension... but for most people convenience wins and well...
It's tough to go up against a monopoly that controls the browser too?
I installed the extension, tested a search, then switched my default back to another search engine. Future searches on you.com failed because I did not have the extension installed - even though I did.
I uninstalled the extension. I don't want to use tools that give me less power over my browsing experience, arbitrarily breaking although I'd done what was explicitly documented. I want tools that give me more power.
This seemed interesting to me, but requiring an installation is a no-go, especially for privacy-minded software. I can tell you right now that most privacy-conscious individuals won't give you a proper chance if this is how you treat the onboarding process, regardless of how David V. Goliath the situation seems.
> I hope we can drop this requirement even in Chrome when we become one of the default options.
I don't mean to be pessimistic, but the chances of 'you.com' appearing in my search engine choices is slim to none. You're welcome to drag me through the mud when you prove me wrong, but hedging your entire bet on getting added as a default option is a suicide pact for any software, particularly ones that are competing with bigger players.
> It's tough to go up against a monopoly that controls the browser too?
It's tough doing anything on someone else's platform, monopoly or not. This just reads as a vague dismissal of a frankly serious problem. I recommend taking notes out of DuckDuckGo's book, where they took proactive measures to accommodate for security-minded individuals. The fact that they let you connect without Javascript enabled is a subtle nod to their power users, who might be more concerned with that stuff. On the other side of the spectrum is you.com, which requires me to install an extension while promising that it's 'more secure' in the end. The optics are not good, particularly for the people who know what they're looking for.
It seems to me like becoming a default search option is something you.com should work on (and should be much easier) once you are already really successful, but blocking instant try-out of search on the most popular browser is going to prevent you.com from achieving the user numbers needed to achieve that. I have literally never installed a Chrome extension and never will, so I guess I will never find out what improvements to the search results you can offer compared to other search engines.
Looks like the issue is that the submitted link is a search for “you.com”, which appears to be a special search result that includes prominent promotion of the Chrome extension, regardless of which browser you’re using. It would probably have been a better idea to submit a link to the landing page or a normal search result.
Ok, after trying incognito, I do like it, but I'm not ready to switch my default from DDG yet. Maybe on the non-incognito chrome results page you could include a note that your search can be tested from incognito along with the prompt to install the extension?
Yea. It's not like we're tryin to block users :)
We just found that without the convenience of a navbar search - you're ngmi (not gonna make it) as a search engine.
We hope we can drop all restrictions in the future.
This sort of attitude that prioritizes your own growth over the experience of your customers does not bode well for a company that is trying to sell itself as committed to user privacy.
I generally don't like when technology gets itself in the way to solve a problem. Why would you need the user to make your search engine the default one before even trying it?
This is red flag at least for me, far from convenient and I doubt that installing an extension can be justified by privacy.
If your search has better value to me than say, Google, why don't let me make the decision of putting it as my default?
You're asking me upfront to grant you privileges (access to Chrome API's that are otherwise not available to you) by installing an extension? That is a no-go for many security minded people.
Also: Opening an extension link after clicking on the "search" input field looks pretty much like a dark pattern to me. This is something to avoid when it comes to a friendly UX.
I'm really not sure what you are talking about. Go to you.com and type a search query. No need to make anything the default. No need to install an extension.
Edit: Ah, now I see. It's because I'm a Safari user. If you go to you.com in Safari it works fine. However, if you go to it in Chrome it does indeed work as you described, asking you to install the extension and whatnot. My mistake.
It says on the front page "Add you.com to Chrome to get started" which to my mind implies that in order to get started you have to be using Chrome and add the extension to it.
You don't have to, you can just use it as a web page, the text is misleading and should be changed.
I think that's only if you're using Chrome. I'm in firefox and just did some searches like you'd do on any other search engine. That's a really weird design choice regardless.
I know you had a bad day today Richard Socher. I am sorry for that.
Reading through these comments must have hurt, and in some strange "The Egg" [1] way hurt me too. I felt as everyone that left a bad comment, and I felt as you, receiving all this. And all that after finally releasing the beta of your product, having worked very hard for that.
I am impressed by your stoic attitude and not caving in under all this pressure (this was probably as far as 'blood baths' on HN go). Truly remarkable, even though you obviously made a product marketing mistake here.
I encourage you to keep going and carefully read all the advice you got here today, for free. This time, let it all in. The cause is still good, the execution is clearly suboptimal. It's on you to get there.
We had so much positivity on all other platforms but things here did get very toxic and personal - which was a first for me :(
We still listen to our users and dropped the extension requirement.
Folks assume a lot of bad intent from us even though Chrome clearly states that the extension only has write access to one field and no other permissions.
We'll improve and learn from this. We're a super small team and are just launching our v1 beta.
Better, better, never done :)
>Folks assume a lot of bad intent from us even though Chrome clearly states that the extension only has write access to one field and no other permissions.
No, it's that we see similarities to that which has burned us before.
The insistence on an extension is one example, sure, but there's also the lack of clear answers to questions people have posed about how you intend to handle monetization/selling of user data in the future (and the wording you've used so far regarding it), questions around data currently being sent to third-parties while using You's "private mode", and that you essentially tried gaslighting a community of people that would know better[1].
I'm not saying your intent is bad, I'm saying you came to a community that is inherently less trusting about this kind of tech and while they may have shot from the hip (albeit with valid questions/concerns), you haven't done much to assuage those concerns.
Let's just call it what it is, HN is stocked full of people who are smart enough to know better before being placated by a nobody with 20MM in debt trying to profit off of us ostensibly by using our community as a soap box. Do not forget this is a community built on VC.
In my opinion, there is zero tech in Richard, he's all suit. Someone who wanted to be a CEO, and now they're a CEO on full display.
So, in the long run, how is your app not becoming Google?
Anyone who makes money with ads has rational incentives to not respect your user's time and privacy. That's even worse for search engines.
I would gladly pay for search engines that have community curated content, I want business that have incentives aligned with me as a customer, free stuff with ads is horse shit.
Private ads worked for DDG to some degree but we think it's not the most creative idea.
We've just launched our MVP version this week and haven't implemented these other more creative monetization ideas.
We care deeply about trust, privacy and choice so we want to be careful: We don't want to implement these things or tell our competition about our plans before making progress and getting feedback from our users on them.
Question about a key UX decision: Why do all the search results open in a new tab with target="_blank"? This is the only search engine I can think of that has this behavior. I find it pesky from a user's point of view. If I want new tabs I can command-click the link.
As it is, the UI doesn't provide the user any way to navigate away from You.com when opening a search result. I've always viewed new-tab links to be a kind of "sneaky" way to inflate engagement metrics, but I think it's particularly negative for usability on a search engine.
[edit] Even odder, clicking the You logo in the upper-left corner of the search results page opens the You.com homepage in a new tab. What is the purpose of that?
I can see it both ways. From what I've learned, Google does open results in a new tab by default in some countries, and they recently added the option to choose the new tab behavior. Adding that as an option could be a way to solve it.
Just from a webdev perspective, please add titles to your links and icons. I should be able to hover over those up and down arrows and know they're for voting. I should be able to hover links and see the full link text even it's clipped in the card.
These are basic accessibility things that any good web developer should be adding in by default.
If I recall correctly, Google was very successful at the beginning because of their instant results coming back in a dead simple list of links and some details.
When I searched on you.com, I got these ugly pulsating placeholders, and then could smell the oily engines in my device whirring up to send that damn heavy AJAX query to let me wait another 2 seconds to get something displayed.
I like the idea, and wish a lot of luck to this project, but the UX is just bad, sorry.
Thanks for your feedback.
I agree.
Our first beta, especially with massive traffic right now, is too slow. We'll work on speed. Better, better, never done.
This is neat work. Regarding the extension requirement, you state that you believe that it's impossible to compete without the convenience of navbar search, aka against Google/Chrome. You may be right, but this thread should demonstrate how highly polarizing that choice is for your users.
Two notes:
* Your competition space is much bigger than just Google. As a privacy browser, you compete against DDG. They actively remove friction. Right now they are a better product. There are more competitors still.
* If your focus is on general search your product isn't as good as Google right now.
It sounds like there are some neat ideas here with summarization and "apps" targeted towards niches like developers, but it's simply not a drop in replacement people are going to use as their daily driver.
It's OK to moon-shot and becoming the next big general search engine certainly qualifies. If I were on your board, I'd tell you to compete against products, not the market positions. I'd tell you not to alienate potential users. Don't draw a box around yourself and say "I want to break the Google monopoly", innovate and you won't have to.
For web search, are you using the Bing API? If so, do you have thoughts from the private beta on how it compares to Google - where it does similarly/better, where it does worse?
Great question: We are first ranking apps and then within apps we have some of our own ranking but e.g. web results come from Bing.
We have found that when non-web-result-apps trigger in the top 2, we are often as good or better than Google.
Web results by themselves are a mixed bag, which is why we built out lots of custom apps for developers, e.g.
Whenever the subject of personalising search results comes up in technical communities, the most common thing I hear are people saying they wish they could remove W3Schools from their search results automatically. Specifically that particular site. It’s got a terrible reputation. People have even built browser extensions to do it:
In that context, it seems strange you consider this a selling point when so many people regard the inclusion of this site in their search results to be a failure. Perhaps pick a different site to keep mentioning? It doesn’t give the best impression when you proudly say “Hey, you know that site you hate? We give it special priority!”
Is it possible to remove this site from your results entirely?
Also, it’s not clear what “JSON checkers” means in the context of a search engine.
I like the concept but the desktop version makes me scroll horizontally to look through results. I'd rather scroll vertically on desktop, and come to think of it I'd probably prefer vertical on mobile. Scrolling sideways like that is really annoying.
Looks pretty! And seems to understand my use of operators pretty well too, which is great.
What does the extension even do tho? Site functionality seems just fine as an unlogged, incognito user.
If it really just sets my default search engine, I'd personally much prefer some cute explanation about how to set it on my browser myself than install a thing that will run code on my own laptop to do it? idk if that's actually common or not but this is a personal preference of mine.
Hard pass. Not installing a CE to test this out. Not changing my default search engine straight away. Not convinced based on what I see there is value added here. Fix those things and I will give it whirl.
thanks for your feedback! Requiring the default was a tough choice for us. Totally hear you on your distrust of extensions. If you still want to try out our product, we have more details on alternatives for you over here
I've always wanted a search engine that searched mainly (only?) Stack Overflow, Reddit, and a handful of other authentic sites.
One note: You.com seems to include Stack Overflow scrapers in the results. Would be better with those removed. These two results go the same content, one on SO and one scraped from it: https://i.imgur.com/TwvDIiC.png
I agree, I had that experience too. SO duplicates are bad but official documentation pages of libraries would be very good, so I guess it'll be a bit difficult to determine which pages should be allowed as there will be quite a few domains.
Just some random thoughts with subjective opinions:
- Too much whitespace in my opinion.
- Rows instead of columns feel a bit alien and are uncomfortable to use.
- Missing tooltips (E.g. the buttons with the arrows: Are this upvote/downvote buttons or buttons to change the order of the sections, this is not clear without clicking)
- Doesn't have a automatic dark mode (Well, it's a beta product, so I wouldn't expect it)
- Some images look wrong (Firefox 94, Fedora): https://imgur.com/a/bKdTYPj
The news selections is at least for events in germany not that good: A lot of at least for me unknown newspapers, no Spiegel, Zeit, Süddeutsche, ... (Searchterm: "3g bayern")
The front page has multiple calls to action to install their Chrome extension but fails to describe what the extension does or why I need it to do a web search.
It sets you.com as your default search engine. ... we thought this was obvious but you're right. We should be more explicit and clear about that!
Thanks for the feedback.
Came back and tried it. My reason for entering any random text and not coming back would be because the search results are presented like Pintrest or Digg rather than an easily scannable list format--search engines use formats for reasons. Great UX--if I wanted to pass time scrolling about programming instead of Instagram.
My suggestion would be to have all your developers use your search engine exclusively. Use their feedback, you may have already come up with many of the suggestions being presented here.
I wasn't speaking of the apps, though I presume they have the same layout as the no install demo. I want search results in a dense text list, not a sparse-with-too-much-whitespace multicolumn 'cards' that seem so popular with UX-style-rather-than-ergonomic-focused startups.
Brave browser seems to have figured out a way to make money on ads without sacrificing user data/privacy. If you opt in to their ads they basically sync ad campaigns to your browser and then use local browsing profiles that don't get sent to any servers to decide which ads to show you. It all happens on your computer and it doesn't send your profile to anybody, so the only user data involved is "user looked at an ad, but we have no idea who actually looked at it".
How do you know it is not sacrificing user data/privacy? It sends a lot of requests 'home' to their servers with your private information like IP address in them. At best you should be wary of that. If privacy is your concern you should look for a zero-telemetry browser, and even better if ads are not their primary business model.
It's REALLY easy to check what the browser is doing and multiple people have. There was an article floating around claiming it phones home but many people very quickly pointed out that the author was mistaken, at best (they thought some CSS or something completely normal being loaded in the background was brave "phoning home").
The question is not what the browser is doing (which is easily verifiable with a network proxy, even without the browser being open source), but the question is what the server is doing with the data that is being sent to it by the browser, and that data includes PII like the IP address.
The best way to remove this question is for browsers to be zero-telemetry which is what I was advocating for.
This is the problem. When ads are your primary revenue stream, you're up against facebook and google, who are both highly efficient at turning marketing dollars into conversions.
How would you complete with this? Why would anyone spend 10x on you to get the same conversions?
According to https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/you-com-523e they have received $20M in funding, so as long as they have a sensible burn rate, they could last for years before having to think about how to make a profit. Although the projects that don't have a plan at the outset always seem to either turn bad or fail.
To your point, this is why I would avoid them. Give me faith that I won't see you end up monetizing/selling user data or doing something dumb to your user base when that cash runs out. Otherwise I'm inherently not going to trust you.
The OP even admitted he hasn't given any thought to monetization, which almost certainly means that this is another dime-a-dozen startup with a built-in exit strategy. The fact that his primary value proposition is that You isn't Google, is a telltale sign that this is destined to join Color in the annals of startup failures.
I've used the you.com beta for about a month, and I've switched back to DuckDuckGo because the results were too slow to show up and the elements on the results page jumped around too much. Superficial, I know, but I just didn't want to wait for all the extra answers to pop up.
Yea. We've had some speed regression last month as we've crammed in a bunch of features.
We'll work more on speed, reducing extra apps that might not be needed and you can try again in a few weeks, if you want :)
If I could pay $5 or $10 (or heck $25) a month for a programmable search engine, then I'm ready.
But competing with Google 90% on "their terms" seems super tough. Yes the design is a little different and that's awesome that You.com is experimenting, but I just wish I could pay for this.
How would that look like exactly? Looking for side projects that could change the world, and this looks like a good way to disrupt search.
If I could marry true copilot with google with maybe some sort of memory garden priority setting for things I come back to often (code, packages, docs, etc)....that'd be kinda nice...
gpt3(like ) + search could be interesting but extremely costly for compute, though might actually be a decent reason to build something on blockchain (all users add compute, get paid for the storage, and gpu usage, one big botnet just to handle search).
Just thinking aloud about how one would presumably pull this off.
Ideally a mind/brain search interface would be nice someday, but the privacy concerns is cringy, but maybe something like alexa that listens while I talk to myself and looks at what I'm typing and gleans from that what I might need in terms of looking up stuff when I'm stuck on a coding problem, or if I were writing a novel, or some other creative endeavor.
Or imagine an ai that continually just monitors the screen, and when I'm having trouble w/ a tool like learning Unity3d or some graphics tool, it can glean from the screen I'm on what help I need and suggest things...
I really wish we did have new cool search tools like these in 2021... maybe by 2030 we will.
You pay for the search product but you're able to do a ton of cool things that Google will likely never be incentivized to do. Basically turn the open web into a platform that works for you:
- Setup highly custom alerts when a webpage changes content (e.g. ___ is now on sale)
- Broaden search to include things like my contacts, docs, Wikipedia, etc. Ideally this is all done in a small little local index
- Automatic visualization of the content graph (e.g. who reported on __ first and who is just regurgitating primary sources?)
How would a programmable search engine look like to you? Would providing what you look for with a) a search query b) tagging what you are looking for on screen on 3 results and c) getting results at scale sent to
you be a programmable search engine? (then --> [1])
Hi Richard, how does your organization achieve carbon neutrality? What metrics are available, or how do you know it's accurate?
As a software engineer, this has never been a requirement of me, but I want to start conscientiously working for a company that prioritizes it. I have toyed with the idea of Raspberry Pis, Starlink, and solar panels to host a carbon-neutral Kubernetes cluster.
(P.S. I submitted an application, but regardless will be interested to follow You.com for the upcoming years)
I don't like requiring a chrome extension to search, and giving a 404 error on uninstall (https://you.com/chrome_uninstall_survey) is suspicious. If the developers aren't checking links and testing their product, then I don't want to use it.
You actually can try it out in incognito mode and any other browser. But we found that without the convenience of a navbar search, most people won't give it a proper try either way.
I hope we can drop this requirement even in Chrome when we become one of the default options.
If you set your search engine default to http://you.com manually in Chrome with "https://you.com/search?q=%s" you will not need the extension... but for most people convenience wins and well...
It's tough to go up against a monopoly that controls the browser too?
Regarding the uninstall error. We are waiting to get approval from the Chrome store to update the extension.
Present the extension as an option then, not a requirement, with instructions on how to add the search manually.
It looks promising but if you block access without the extension, a portion of users like me are just not going to give it a chance. Not just because it's inconvenient but I rarely install extensions because it opens up the browser more to potential bad actors when I want it as secure as possible. I also don't want to change my browser settings before trying and the fact you require an extension is just a bad signal of what's to come.
Yea.
That makes sense. I avoid extensions myself since many of them are super sketch.
This one literally changes just one setting and you get the same results if you do it manually. But most web users won't know how to make setting changes.
We describe the steps for all the different browsers in the first link of our FAQ:
> This one literally changes just one setting and you get the same results if you do it manually
I just checked and this isn't actually true though, it looks like it also installs a service worker that runs some code in background.js. It sucks I needed to look at the extension's contents to verify that and backs up why I wouldn't want to install it in the first place.
My proposal seems win-win, you can even push the extension hard in the search page if it's not installed due to your concern, provided you allow it to be easily and permanently dismissed.
Just wanted to provide some more info on the background service worker, though if you've pulled the code you've probably already seen the same.
Right now that worker does two things. It redirects to a survey if you uninstall the extension (going away in the next update once it makes it through the webstore review), and it allows detection of the installed extension since its required in Chrome unless you search from the url/navbar.
And just so there's full details on the restriction here too:
We determine if the search is from the url/navbar only through that fromSearchBar query parameter, so either manually entering the url without that query param, following links without that query param, or by setting your default in your settings manually and searching from the url/navbar will all work. It is just that search bar on the page that gets disabled without the extension. There's also no restriction right now on non-Chrome browsers or in a Chrome Incognito Window.
Thanks for digging in, bringing that up for clarification, and for your proposal!
I hope your team is aware how underhanded your approach and responses seem; why not just be honest off the bat?
When I saw this pop up I went and had a go, even created an account. Then I read through the correspondence here and I won't ever be browsing to you.com again.
> This one literally changes just one setting and you get the same results if you do it manually.
I don't think you understand: automatically changing even one of my browser settings is you changing one setting too many. It is signaling that your target market are unsophisticated users whom you're trying to scam into changing their browser defaults and not know how to change back.
That's the exact opposite of your "built for devs" marketing message. When your message and your actions conflict, it's pretty obvious that you don't really believe the message.
You went to the trouble of showing "To see results and get the convenience of you.com, you’ll need to add the you.com Chrome extension" when you could have just showed me the **** search results.
This isn't making it more convenient, bro. You(dot com) just wasted my 10 seconds.
You're stabbing yourself in the leg in order to spite Google
Hey Mr. Socher, I see that you've changed the site to allow anonymous searches. I just tried it out, and I have to admit, it worked really damn well for finding a pancake recipe. Good luck!
Personally, I think 'know your market' might come into play, at least having the options easily there to do it manually. Many of us tech types would much rather configure chrome to add the search engine, than rely on another extension.. I already have too many, and sometimes I think they mess things up, so less is better imho.
You can try the search engine without installing it in Chrome. Use incognito mode and put it in the search bar at the top. Doesn't work when its not in incognito mode though(?)
What makes it "for devs"? I tried searching some programming queries that I'd typically make during a workday and the results were... fine, I guess, but it was basically just web results? Sometimes there were a few enhanced results, but they weren't very good or useful, like when I searched for `java string split` and got back enhanced results showing me how to split a string in Python and Javascript.
There's a bar of "search apps" along the bottom of the page that doesn't do anything if I click on any of them, so I dunno, maybe it would be better if I made an account and added some apps... or I could keep using DuckDuckGo and just type `!so java string split` when I forget trivial method signatures and want to search StackOverflow instead of figuring out what a "search app" is.
Also, this is really, really pushy about being your default search engine. That's a big step! It's like someone talking about moving in with you on the first date. Maybe convince me first?
Thanks for removing the extension requirement! Here's some feedback now that I can use the site:
- The summaries can be pretty nice when the thing I'm looking for is hidden in a body of text... but not so much when I'm just trying to find a product, or a specific website.
- I like the favicons... maybe also make the url a little more prominent? (I tend to scan for reputable looking urls when I'm sifting through search results)
- Products from Amazon etc would be great with images.
- Maybe I just need to get used to it, but I feel like I've already been conditioned to scroll vertically through results. Scrolling horizontally also requires more effort... so you'll have to work really hard to keep the most relevant results on the left, because no one is going to keep looking to the right.
- you autocompletes to youtube.com ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All, in all... it's a neat product and brings nice and new things to the table. I hope that you can try and focus on improving the quality of the search experience rather than taking marketshare and overturning a monopoly.
Please feel free to respond to as many questions as you have time for.
1. I'm a huge fan of your ML work while you were at Stanford. If I may steal a minute or two from you, I'd like to ask, why do you think recursive neural networks have lost out to other architectures (basically transformers) when it comes to NLP, where intuition would suggest the composionality of language would favor recursive NNs? Do you think recursive NNs will make a come-back sometime?
2. Also, you say on HN that you.com is "the world's first open search engine platform that summarizes the web for you". Do you mean this in the sense of summarization in the NLP sense, or some other interpretation? I did a couple of searches on you.com, and I didn't notice anything that "summarized" (in the NLP sense).
3. From the business side, what's to stop Google from straight up copying your features if you gain traction? They can certainly afford to pay for talent, and are not known to be sloths when it comes to new tech.
1. The driving force behind neural net architecture choice right now is hardware architecture. The model that can be trained with more data and more parameters, will win over any other model. Parallelization is amazing.
I do think they'll make a comeback when people try to do more high level reasoning and try to learn that.
2.
I do mean it in several senses. We looked into neural net algos for summarization but they often produce outputs that sound good but might not be factual. The other problem is that when you search for "best thai restaurants near me" you don't want a nnet lm - generated text. Most ppl would prefer a list of tiles with restaurants and important facts about them. So the models will need to be multimodal.
Lastly, each app is essentially one dimension of looking at a query/topic. You can always "zoom" into each dimension more by swiping left/right or choose a different way of looking at this query by swiping up/down.
3.
They do have all the talent but it's hard to copy privacy features for Google because they make too much money "selling" it to advertisers (ie making it accessible to hyper target people everywhere online/on the phone/etc).
It'll also be hard to copy our entire design and apps and give people agency because they hyper optimized their design for maximizing ad revenue. They also won't open up their platform to let anybody contribute or people decide the order of their results. Etc....
So... I'm just a little worried, not too much :)
They really tried to make search results look different from competition. While I'm all for experimentation, horizontal scroll and huge overload of cards doesn't work for me.
I for one am just glad there are more competitors entering this space. Google search has been getting worse over the last several years to the point where I can't find what I'm looking for with non-technical searches. Google always tries to figure out my intent, and in doing so, fails miserably 1/2 the time.
I pulled up your main page on Firefox and just did a search for "asd" - testing it out. Scrolling down a bit to images shows me some definitely NSFW images. If the goal is to be used in the workplace since you mention developer-focused "search-apps" then this is a nonstarter for me. Just a heads up.
> Benioff’s involvement with the startup includes the transfer of the You.com domain name, which he has owned since the 1990s.
Neither he nor the startup would comment on the terms of the URL exchange, and it was not clear whether the transfer formed part of the overall investment. Beyond Benioff’s TIME Ventures, other investors include Breyer Capital, Sound Ventures and Day One Ventures.
For some reason whenever I try to go to the New York Times site from my phone the browser autocompletes to the HN URL. So it’s really Safari’s fault that I’m here so often...
Hey all.
We heard you today.
The Chrome extension requirement is gone and we are fully open in all browsers now.
Thanks for your feedback. Keep it coming :)
I did a few quick searches on differing topics and I must say the relevancy is almost on par with Google. DDG doesn't even come close: especially for typeahead suggestions. Only weird thing is that it doesn't feel fast - may be due to whole HN doing a stress test right now.
It will be nice to default to Web based on previous searches. the default all tab takes forever to load results probably due to images and videos hogging the same page.
It is mentioned as open search engine: what does that mean ? is it open index/api is open or fake open like openai ?
>> we'll never sell your data or follow you around the web and we'll never offer privacy-invading targeted ads.
Thanks. Glad you like the relevancy. We've been working on that for a while.
You're right. Especially today on our launch day, we're a slower than usual. Growing pains of launching a search engine :|
We'll improve speed for sure in the coming weeks.
We will open up the platform so people can contribute their own apps in the future.
We're also open in the sense that users can actually select their preferences and change their search results.
We will continue to work on opening up more of the stack in the future. Stay tuned :)
I assume the site has been changed in response to the things people are saying here as the search box works and I was able to start trying queries immediately.
First thing I tried was a dev-related query I was getting annoyed with Google about yesterday: GeneratorExecutionContext. This is a type used in C# source generators and is documented in the Microsoft .NET docs.
With Google, none of the first page results contain the string "GeneratorExecutionContext" or even relate to C# source generators. With you.com the desired ms docs result is the first listed and all the others are relevant.
I can get similar results on Google by enclosing the search term in quotes, but this doesn't absolve Google. GeneratorExecutionContext isn't an plausible typo for Thread.ExecutionContext or scala.concurrent.ExecutionContext or any of the other things Google listed. It's a verbatim match to something that exists in MS docs.
I find this kind of over-interpretation-by-dedault behaviour exceptionally annoying. Sure, if you think some leftfield interpretations of my input might be of interest, go ahead and add them into the results, but don't just assume I'm incapable of saying what I mean.
I don't know how you.com is actually working here, but frankly even if it's just a verbatim text search that includes common sources of programming info I'm interested. It certainly won on this single sample search.
It's the only way to be a real search engine right now with a monopoly that blocks you from the navbar of your browser.
Without that convenience, would you really try it for a few days and go back every time until you're convinced?
You're getting a lot of consistent feedback from lots of people that this way of explaining things doesn't land the way you think it will. The feedback is all well meaning, and signifies (I think) that people want an alternative to Google, and want to engage with you. That should be a signal that you should listen to them.
The stuff about monopolies may be your personal truth, it may be your motivation. It might even be technically correct.
But the people in this thread are real, and have a spectrum of experiences and perspectives which are different to yours. They may therefore may say things and react in ways that diverge with what you think they'll say and do. That's a great learning opportunity.
Taking feedback is a challenge sometimes, but how well you meet that challenge may well determine the success of your business!
(All my opinion, but it's frustrating that you returned to this thread the next day without seeming to have have accepted the feedback you came here for. I came to the above realization a few years back and it really helped, so I'm paying it forward!)
lol this guy sounds like he fought the hard fight against vcs, raised his 20m, and now is so exhausted he can’t bear the weight of actually talking to *customers*.
In truth, we've all been there right? We haven’t spent 7 figures on a domain name, but we’ve thought we’ve crossed all the t’s dotted all the i’s etc. It’s just everything changes (your expectations) the moment the boat hits the water…
Google became a household name without any extensions and even without navbar searching. They offered a superior search engine with good results, and everyone visited google.com to search. That is how “google it” became a household term and they achieved their 2 trillion dollar magnitude.
Duckduckgo worked the same way. Everyone visited DuckDuckGo.com to search, enjoyed good search results with their privacy factor. There were no extensions or scripts to start, it was landing page driven.
You are trying to circumvent the “hard work” aspect of creating a competitive search engine. You need to offer good search results from your landing page. Your domain is simple to type and shouldn’t be hard to remember for anyone on earth.
Stop trying to skip the important steps of having a search engine and trying to fly directly to the top.
Also, your api calls are ludicrous. Duckduckgo touts privacy and works without JavaScript enabled. Again, you need to stop trying to be google right out of the gate. Just offer a good product and allow people to use it as they will.
I get one experience in Incognito mode, a completely different one in normal mode. They tell you to install a Chrome ext to use it when you can just do so without it in incognito mode. Removing the ext also takes you to a 404 page that seems suspect.
Already playing tricks on users at launch, at least it took Google a decade to remove their "don't be evil."
Yea... Requiring the default was a tough choice.
You actually can try it out in incognito mode and any other browser.
We didn't want to mess with privacy in incognito mode but just found that without the convenience of a navbar search it's hard to break many years of a monopoly dominating search. I hope we can drop this requirement even in Chrome when we become one of the default options.
But as you found out, installing and uninstalling takes only a few seconds.
Regarding the uninstall bug... not sure why you think that bug is an "evil" "trick" :)
We are just in beta and still have to iron things out.
We are waiting to get approval from the Chrome store and will fix that bug soon.
Richard, would it be possible to merge the private mode and personal mode? Right now, it's tagged as incognito and it's not on by default, this should seriously be considered. This thread has seriously become toxic, You.com is just in the beginning stage. We can use DuckDuckGo-like model by not tracking users, but instead allow users to set their own country and give search results based on that. Because most normal people will automatically not switch to and use private mode by default and that simply makes you.com non-private. This is a concern almost everyone here and anyone who is serious about privacy would have. I hope to get answers from you soon in-regards to this. Again in-terms of the experience, you.com is unique, but it's potential shouldn't be limited by having privacy is an optional mode, this WILL push people away.
> we'll never sell your data or follow you around the web and we'll never offer privacy-invading targeted ads.
What about non-privacy-invading targeted ads? I'm sure google and facebook would both say that they don't "sell your data or... offer privacy-invading targeted ads" so It seems like a pretty weak promise.
if they are pushing an extension then they are probably trying to monetize by putting their affiliate code on the url when you go to places that have affiliate programs like Amazon.
You are right to be skeptical of extensions. There are a lot of sketchy ones out there but...
Nope. We aren't doing that and not planning to.
All the extension does is change one setting.
If you set your search engine default to http://you.com manually in Chrome with "https://you.com/search?q=%s" you will not need the extension... but for most people convenience wins and well...
It's tough to go up against a monopoly that controls the browser too?
Yes. Yes you are. You've spent unspecified amounts of money (likely millions if not tens of millions) on acquiring the you.com domain. Investors will be very interested to get that money back.
You know what would be great? to add the date in which the source became available, or the date of the "accepted answer", or the date of the last edit. Many SO answers and answers in forums are more than a decade old. I signed up and will try t out, I am doing all my searches in you.com now
Although the page loads extremely slowly, I'm on a modern Ryzen 3, on a 100 mbit connection and my computer is really struggling to load the page. Like it takes nearly 5 seconds and I can't imagine what is taking so long to present the search bar with no search results.
Hi Richard! I think competition against Google is a good thing, so I will give you and whoever else is tackling this area the strategic advice I would give myself if I was in this problem space.
If you read the comments, including your own, you’ll come to the same conclusion people did 30 years ago, while witnessing Netscape accidentally hand Yahoo the keys to the kingdom: if you want to control the search engine, control the web browser. And if you want to control the web browser... Make a web browser.
That’s not a particularly profound thought, obviously. Having a great index only took Google so far — it was obvious to them that their fate was in the hands of the browsers, and that they’d have to either own the browsers or pay the people who owned them. They did both. They’re still doing both, and that very simple equation drives a very significant portion of their entire empire.
At this point, you’re (You is? Hmm...) doing neither of these things. You’ve got a browser extension and a website that is easy to visit and then forget about. But the world of 2021 requires you to solve that browser problem if you’re going to get anywhere.
Since you’ve got access to the largest pool of capital in the world, why don’t you do it? Go back to Benioff and your other investors and tell them they’ve under-funded the mission for what you’ve got to do to make a dent in this problem space: you need to create a really great search engine and a really great web browser, and have the two tightly integrated and coupled in a way that DoJ-wary Google could never do in 2021. Yes, it’s a mission that requires a zero added to that $20m war chest, but it’s also big and weird and exciting enough to get a lot of really smart people to come out of retirement and under-employment to see what’s possible.
There’s still a very high chance of failure with this strategy, but there’s also a very high chance of something interesting and weird and different coming out of it, such that those who are involved as both employees and users would say, “that didn’t work, and I would have been financially better off just parking my savings in GOOG, but the work we did was truly different and special.” The best people in Silicon Valley are always chasing this sort of romance. You know, like, “come make a ‘dent in the universe’ at my failing computer company that acquired my other failing computer company, even though you’ll be underpaid and get stock options that are likely to be worthless, because we could maybe possibly redefine the future of computing.” Benioff once knew a guy like that.
While this is a thing I'd very much like to try I make a point out of not using Chrome && badgering everyone who tries to force me to use it.
Had to use it the other day to verify if a particular bug at a customer system was Firefox-specific (as usual it wasn't) but it meant a four months streak or so was wasted :-/
So no, while this is really interesting it still has to be even more interesting for me to allow that piece of modern spyware to run on my machine.
(Some might think I'm to harsh here but my understanding is Chrome is almost as much spyware as much as the famous Bonzibuddy that we struggled with earlier this millenium, only somewhat less buggy ;-)
You'd actually get rid of the biggest spyware - Google ;)
Our extension is 33kB and has not other function than changing your default (and checking if the extension itself is installed).
You actually can try it out in incognito mode and any other browser. But we found that without the convenience of a navbar search, most people won't give it a proper try either way.
I hope we can drop this requirement even in Chrome when we become one of the default options.
We will implement an a/b test and see if we can get rid of the requirement even earlier.
If you set your search engine default to https://you.com manually in Chrome with "https://you.com/search?q=%s" you will not need the extension... but for most people convenience wins and well...
It's tough to go up against a monopoly that controls the browser too?
I hear what you've posted about competing with a $2t competitor but I'm not installing an extension and changing default search engine just to try your service out. Even going incognito or using another browser is more effort than reasonable to play around. Put a banner at the top requesting the change but blocking users? That's just unfriendly and puts me off from the start.
> You'd actually get rid of the biggest spyware - Google ;)
Good point now that I realize that it works in other browsers.
My initial impression was that 1) it only worked in Chrome and 2) it required an extension to work even there.
I wish you luck and also think this is a good time to launch:
I feel I was an early adopter of Google and I have now more or less left Google behind (it is now DuckDuckGo.com by default, and even some search.marginalia.nu).
A few years ago Google was so amazing it was impossible to compete with them but these days they are making it easy for DDG which is kind of OK and search.marginalia.nu is coming up as the small but delightful alternative :-)
At least Bonzai Buddy was cute. Also I thought I was the only weirdo who sorta kept track of my not-using-chrome streak. If we met for lunch I'm sure everyone else at the table would find themselves staring off into space as our conversation became increasingly difficult to relate to.
The big blue "install Chrome extension" got all my attention and it also didn't help that the placeholder text in the search field came off as decoration, but in the end I admit I didn't read carefully.
I really love the extensions and the layout
I'm a designer, learning to code
and even if I'm not using it for search regarding dev stuff
I really like the vision and thought process
Big Kudos to the entire team working on this stuff.
I have no issues with installing extension, I have 100's already and I only a dozen of them frequently
It'd be great if you could integrate some functionality similar to spotlight like, keyboard shortcut to invoke the search that also searches past sites and info on them
Also, it'd be great if it could suggest websites and news based on my search history
potential features could be like pinning and grouping sites like toby
I assumed people were exaggerating about the extension being pushed too strongly, but I couldn't even test a simple search to check the results or see how it looked. Incredible.
Interesting idea. I thought I'd just try searching for something that I might be looking up - 'java convert int[] to Integer array'
DDG gives me an example from SO in the results which is one of the main reasons I continue to use it. No one else manages to do this and it seems that you.com can't either.
However, it does give me Code Complete which is interesting but doesn't cover Java and for some reason is below images.
I just tried with a python query - 'size of array python'. That worked much better. Got an example at the top. I might try this search out when I'm not working with Java.
- the rounded corners remind me of the 2000s, and they kind of hurt my eyes; they take attention away from the text
- I search for some niche CS topics; all the links I see I've seen on other search engines as well ...
- ... which kind of makes this "google with a different layout" and some "categories", not terrible, but also not that different
Now here's a challenge: Do some smart on-the-fly abstractive multi-document summarization and display a fluent mix of text, images and videos on a topic. Like a report. That would be a game changer, I'd think.
If someone can pull this off, that might be you, Richard :)
I tried you.com about a month ago in beta. Even made it a default browser for 2 days.
I like the concept but for me it is too early. It's also complicated because as a citizen of non-English speaking European country I need to be able to search in my native language. Understandably, the search quality is much worse in my native language than in English.
Also, as with DDG before, I realised how much of a feature the personalisation of Google results is. Alternative engines often sell lack of personalisation as an advantage, and I see the point, but it also means less relevant results.
I love testing out new search engines because it's clear to everyone that the current situation is awful. For instance, my team built a custom webapp that is objectively the best in the niche and we get steamrolled by SEOed-to-hell wordpresses in google, which is bad enough, but with search engines like duckduckgo and bing, there are sites that just literally copied our HTML and pictures and are doing better than us on rankings.
You.com seems to at least follow google's general rankings, which is an improvement on that at least. Good luck.
Few things I have always wanted in a search engine -
- Filter out news/SEO'd sites. Better if by default.
- Specialized categories - software dev, real estates, travel, garden, finance, ....
- More weight on verifiable authors. Eg. blogs, publications, good quality social media posts (quora, reddit, linkedin), etc.
- Geo-temporal-social context in search. Able to navigate results by time and space easily.
Also, might be good to have search engine interface be like an app than a website. The secret search features should be upfront and interact-able.
Google factors in duration of stay on a page when ranking domains, not just the keywords. That allows for higher quality sites to surface at expense of SEO keyword gamified ones. Searching for Online Wishlist surfaces a bunch of “Wishlist%” starting domains that offer junk services. The private quality ones with high duration of stay are not showing, even after a lot of scrolling. Same with other queries. Something to keep in mind. The highest quality search comes from a lot of context, not just about the user.
Can’t edit anymore. Just wanted to say sorry if that came off too negative. I really want to like a potential Google competitor.
UX things that I wish were improved:
- scrolling vertically and horizontally to find results is quite confusing and a lot of effort
- low DPI icons make the page look unpolished
- too many “things”, the results page doesn’t fit on an iPhone 12 mini’s screen without horizontal scrolling
- fonts change style after they appear making it look jittery and unpolished
- upvoting/liking seems like a good idea; would reconsider value downvote brings. It seems to convey results are user controlled and prone to vote wars
The results are pretty good, but the UX is poor. Wishing you and the team the best.
The landing page seems...busy. Is this what results will look like after a search? I'm not being facetious. And I'm certainly not a dev-dev (filthy casual, some might call me) so maybe I'm just not seeing what the advantages are, apart from the much-touted privacy thing.
Also, I moused around and the search bar which I initially thought would give me a chance to try things out, is actually a tricksy button. Even your average, somewhat-privacy-conscious user is gonna be annoyed by that, at the very least.
For anyone who wants to build a search engine, just look at DuckDuckGo's traffic growth: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic It takes time to grow. Be patient. Don't give up too soon :)
Gave it an actual go rather than a cant-use-because-extension go as the requirement has been removed
Sideways scrolling is always a horrible experience and the page is just a mess of information. I'm not sure I can see myself using this, extension or no. The results are too busy.
Also private mode should be default. Saying you don't set cookies and then I find 3 cookies - one of which seems to identify me with a uuid - is a bit daft. Why isn't this default?
No, the difference here is that for us that's only a small percentage.
If you're a developer, we have several "search-apps" such as StackOverflow (with code snippets), W3Schools, MDN, Copilot-like Code Completion, json checkers, and more.
A few quick points of feedback on a desktop browser.
- The first big data blob at the top being Wikipedia is blatant cheating. It isn't complimentary of your product that you rely on that approach. Devs already know they can find a lot of information about George Washington on Wikipedia, which means you have to figure out a substantial way to add value beyond that.
- The Web Results section is a two row blob mash by default. It's disorienting in terms of deciding which results are most relevant and or have greater authority. I'd suggest defaulting it to one row.
- The Quick Facts section is very underwhelming. Essentially useless. This should be an easy topic to provide quick facts for, relatively speaking, if You.com is going to be useful.
- There is a "Shortcuts" section below Web results. It's not clear initially what that does. For example, are those shortcuts that jump you to external sites (Reddit, Wikipedia icons are shown). Mousing over the shortcuts doesn't reveal anything. Some of the shortcuts jump you around on-page, but the Google shortcut jumps you to Google.com as an external link, without making that clear. This is bad UX. It appears there is some attempt to clarify by the labeling of "You Apps" - nobody knows what that is. I clicked on the Walmart and Weather shortcuts, both said N app is loading; what? No app loaded, but beyond that, why is there a Walmart or Weather shortcut 'app' on the George Washington topic page. I suppose first you might need to figure out what George Washington entity I'm interested in to narrow the relevant shortcuts.
- The Reddit section is ok. Another cheat section, leaning heavy on Reddit as with Wikipedia. Devs don't need a source like this to give them content from Reddit. There isn't much that's special about doing that. There isn't anything impressive about an aggregator that mashes a couple of prominent sources together for topics. You need to add a lot of value on top with what you're doing in utilizing Reddit, something nobody else has that is super useful.
- The news section doesn't understand the topic. That means you get news about an electrical pole being down on George Washington Highway, or news about George Washington University men's college basketball. Users won't come back for this imo, it's too alpha of a product.
Thank you so much for your feedback, we'll make a note and improve the experience (especially regarding the shortcuts section) in the coming weeks. :)
I want to add though that personally, I like seeing wikipedia/reddit results when relevant. same goes with all the other sources we have. I think the novelty is in ranking all the sources we have, and we hope to continue getting better at it.
1. One time it didn’t complete the search input: I typed “math.ran”, tapped math.random in a popup, input didn’t update and remained as is (but results seemed fine). Couldn’t reproduce again, probably a race bug.
2. When I tap into the search input, the page zooms in a little (as it does by default for small inputs on iphone), which is annoying. iPhone SE 2020, portrait, recent iOS.
After just seeing a post for a new service called Gallery and thinking of how annoyed I was at Facebook taking over the word meta and Trump taking over the verb to trump, part of me doesn't want this platform to succeed only because of its name. Someone below typed "I heard about 'you'" and it just made me realize how frustrated I am that so many tech companies seem to be repurposing more and more core words into their brand names. I guess Apple and Amazon have been doing it for a while.
Anyone know why this is happening, also feel annoyed by this, and know if there's any end in sight?
I searched for 'Pouchdb full text search', saw the horizontal scrolling cards then immediately switched back to Startpage.com. I can't see how sorting through info with horizontal scroll could ever be an improvement. It's bad enough on desktop, but most searches happen in mobile where it's even more annoying.
A search engine isn't Instagram... When I tried searching, it was just totally overwhelming to me, since you get a full screen wall of text, not one easy to digest image at a time as with Instagram.
The design looks amateurish/inconsistent, the information was overwhelming, and I felt compelled to leave. You really ought to think more before dismissing your clientele.
A lot of hate here, but I for one love it! I'm quite tired of having almost the entire first page of search results be ads, and then having to also scan passed a ton of undesirable SEO-hacked results to get what I want and this is perfect for not having that. Keep up the good work!
I tried it out and not bad. I like there are no cluttering ads like some search engines. The side scrolling is a little tough to quickly see the results.
And as most said, the forced extension needs to go. It is basically saying if you use Chrome go away.
Tried searching for a problem I had earlier today. Got only one web result, a “quick fact”, a YouTube video, and the final result just asked me to sign into GitHub. Definitely not coming back, seems pretty useless
Did they change the site? Every comment is about having to download an extension before trying out the search engine, but the site works and I've not even been prompted to install anything.
I can move up some certain websites so I see their results on top. Also the ability to swipe the results is a great convenience vs scrolling down. thank you
I get a blank page in Firefox with JavaScript turned off :(
Content Security Policy: The page’s settings blocked the loading of a resource at inline (“script-src”).
Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://you.com/cdn-cgi/scripts/7d0fa10a/cloudflare-static/rocket-loader.min.js”.
We use it to generate code in the code completion app.
But sadly, with our values of trust facts and kindness, we cannot rely on large language models to completely generate the results as they often make up facts.
Wow, it's like a blast from the past on mobile - like some old school search engine with loads of stuff on the screen, it's hard to know where to look.
On the homepage I see some ex-salesforce big shot founded this...
I worked at a company for a month with an ex-bigshot Sales force person who was basically a sociopath. Maybe it's not fair to compare, but this gives me those same vibes.
0:1) I find it irritating that I am not told to download the extension before the search. This is irritating because I've already expended the mental effort to produce a search query, and something tells me that the extension won't remember that query five minutes later after I've installed it, so I'm going to have to copy-paste or do some other out-of-band nonsense to tack down my current mental context.
0:2) I get the anti-big-tech sentiment. (Hell, I run Brave and set my default engine to DDG.) But I also know how frustrating it is when I have to interrupt some flow of thought I have just to perform some boilerplate ritual for the sake of the computer/developer. Tell me I have to install the extension before I run a search. Convince me that the extension isn't low-quality trash like most browser extensions are, that it's not mining Ethereum in the background and that it's not going to grind my CPU to a halt when I'm running full dev.
1) I wanted to dislike the "for devs" branding, but e.g. `v3d linux registers` actually returned relevant results, including relevant files in the Linux source
2) If you want an "in" for an installed based, make an editor extension, probably VS code; Emacs if you want hacker cred
2:0) This will reduce the friction when I as a dev have to learn some aspect of a library/protocol/RFC/spec on the fly, but only for implementation purposes, not to truly grok.
2:1) An editor extension also frees me from certain limitations of the web (even w/ browser extension). A search engine that could parse and present and even make executable certain portion of the IETF RFCs, for instance, could be quite useful
3) The search results are a little "busy," and I'm not sure what these "shortcut" buttons are for. They seem to do nothing for me (on Brave, no extension).
4) Most code search features are awful. GitHub's search, for instance, has so much noise and so little signal that searching Google or DuckDuckGo w/ site:github.com is more likely to find a relevant result.
4:0) This is particularly frustrating because I often want to search private repos that aren't indexed by Google (hint, hint, editor extension)
4:1) I end up using something like The Silver Searcher (`ag`) on the command line in order to find what I'm looking for, esp. in a large codebase. That UX has all of the warmth and simplicity of a wet blanket.
4:2) If you could build local code search that is integrated into global search results per user, and you convincingly proved that ABSOLUTELY NO private local code left the confines of the computer the data was stored on, then you would have a winner. But you'd need absolute credibility (hint, hint, talk to your lawyers).
4:3) While on the subject of lawyers, this engineer would personally love it if privacy policy and TOS were "versioned" so that I could actually trust them to remain stable over time. Today, TOS is always treated as forced upgrade without my consent.
3. The You.com domain must have been an incredibly expensive purchase. The folks that wrote the check for that were cool with never selling user data at any point down the road?
3a. Did the people that wrote the check for you.com make the money they put into it from investing in companies that do sell user data?
4. I’m actually supposed to believe that they don’t have a revenue model at all aside from affiliate links?
5. Most importantly, what is the current valuation of this business?
Hey
1
It's me, Richard Socher and my cofounder Bryan MacCann. Stanford, MetaMind startup, then Salesforce. Plus a bunch of other incredible and wonderful humans :)
2
We raised a 20m seed from Marc Benioff, Jim Breyer and a few others.
3
the you.com has never been for sales.
4
yea. we haven't really thought about it too much but have some creative ideas we want to explore together with our community. in private mode, we may need to have private ads like DuckDuckGo since that mode is hard to monetize any other way.
Whatever we'll explore, will align with our values (trust->privacy, facts and kindness).
5
Not sure how that's the most important one? :D we're not sharing that right now but if you know venture investing and know we raised 20m... you'll get in the ball park?
5 is the most important because without a reasonable revenue model, selling to a larger company and washing your hands of your privacy promises is the clearest way to make money later.
Edit: you guys didn’t buy you.com from anybody? The domain “you.com” was up for grabs and you guys bought it for $10 on godaddy?
Edit 2: Thanks for answering 3a in the affirmative :). Yes, this is funded by folks that have made millions from investing in businesses that sell user data.
He got it from Marc Benioff, who purchased in 1996. I'm assuming as a favor or private transaction, given that Richard and Marc know each other (from Salesforce) and the seed round.
Fair enough. Instead of signing a big check for an incredibly valuable domain, Benioff transferred the incredibly valuable domain from his personal possession to the company.
I’m not personally of the opinion that this is an important enough distinction to avoid talking about my larger point of “This is an expensive endeavor and there is no reason to believe that there is any barrier preventing an exit that involves compromising in the event that Marc Benioff or the other investors at some point want their money back.”
Even if the domain was “free”, the rest of the endeavor is incredibly costly. I’m not really filled with confidence that the founder here either straight up didn’t understand the spirit of my point, or found it advantageous to feign ignorance about this.
Except you've almost exclusively sown distrust and treated this community like we're incompetent. It's beyond disturbing that you believe it's appropriate to gaslight the entire startup community during your product announcement. That's not kind, nor trustworthy, and your "facts" have been entirely wrong.
> My goal is not to get acquired in order to "wash my hands"...
Also, extremely interesting choice of words here. You didn't say you're not aiming to get acquired, you just said that when you do get acquired it won't be for the reasons we all think, which is just more gaslighting and doesn't actually address any of the concerns.
Shameless plug: https://okeano.com is a search engine that respects your privacy, doesn't require an extension and aims to spend 80% of profits to purchase river interceptors and deploy them to the most polluting rivers in the world.
We have !waves (similar to !bangs) and support natively domain blocklisting.
Hi Richard, lucky coincidence - we're launching something similar in that regard today [1][2], in general we say "meeh" to search engines (you did not hear me saying that) but I love to keep watching your project from today on.
We're launching Sentinel, an A.I.based data aggregation tool that does the searching for you and brings you back just results (instead of websites). You could call it a "semantic web enabler with a large language model instead of xml" at it's core – but it's too hard to digest for all people off HN.
Well, I tried to find a pancake recipe on "stovetop.app", "you(dot)com", and "get-sentinel" and so far I'm 0/3 on recipes and 3/3 on irritation for Nov. 9th HackerNews search engines
that led straight to: http://online-cookbook.com/goto/cook/rpage/000DDF , which is possibly the best recipe site I've ever seen in my life. It's just an ingredient list and a paragraph of text below it!
You'll be able to get 100s of recipes sorted by whatever you like to sort them after signing up for the waitlist at our website (and wait a little :))…without clicking through websites that is.
My name is Richard Socher, and I'm the founder of you.com, the world's first open search engine platform that summarizes the web for you. We launched our public beta today, and are excited to share it with you.
If you're a developer, we have several "search-apps" such as StackOverflow (with code snippets), W3Schools, MDN, Copilot-like Code Completion, json checkers, and more. All of them geared to help you code faster. Let us know if you have other app ideas for how to make your coding life better.
We believe in superior privacy choices without losing convenience. Our private mode is the most private experience - we don't store your queries or track your clicks or share IP, etc. And even in our personalized experience, we'll never sell your data or follow you around the web and we'll never offer privacy-invading targeted ads.
We wanted to create a search engine that delivers relevant content, not ads or SEO'd pages, and do it in a whole new interface that puts you in control through personalized preferences. We hope you'll be able to search less and do more.
Looking forward to your feedback and will be here to answer any questions.
Thanks! -RS