You.com is a private search engine that offers users increased privacy, extensible apps, and personalized results through preferred sources. The company also uses an artificial intelligence-based engine to provide results and helpful summaries of information while avoiding junk, fake reviews, biases, and unhelpful advertising. This helps users find information faster while offering increased user privacy.
You.com was founded by Richard Socher and Bryan McCann in 2020 with the intent of developing a new search tool using artificial intelligence to develop a better consumer-focused search tool.
You.com's search engine is developed to provide users with privacy, protecting user data while browsing the web that is free of tracking and invasive advertising. It offers a multi-dimensional interface with horizontal and vertical scrolling for more information sharing, and searches can be personalized with users' preferred applications.
The search does not store user's search, does not collect feedback, nor does it log analytics of users and their search history; the search engine does not log, store, or share users' IP addresses, does not follow users around third-party sites, and it does not offer search leakage via HTTP referrer headers while also encrypting search results. And users can use You.com in a personal or private mode, with personal offering more personalized search through some history storage and private mode taking away all historical user context.
You.com offers a YouCode search, which allows users to search through their favorite sources and use You.com's artificial intelligence to search through preferred coding sources and to help users write code. This feature offers the same privacy features the regular search offers.
You.com offers YouStudy, a search engine developed for students, allowing users to search through preferred sources and applications in one place to find an answer. It also offers trustworthy sourcing to answer student questions in summarizations and is intended to help students learn faster. YouStudy offers the same privacy features as the normal search engine as well.
YouSocial is a social media-focused search option that includes a search of a users' favorite or preferred social media applications in one source and is intended to help users find what they are looking for across social platforms and to see what people are saying on social networks in-browser.
YouChat is a ChatGPT-like artificially intelligent chatbot, which is developed to hold conversations and answer questions similar to ChatGPT, but with access to the internet and connected to the You.com search engine to provide users with summarized information through the search engine.
In 2023, You.com introduced a YouChat 2.0, which built on the original YouChat feature. This generative AI search introduced elements beyond text to help answer a question more precisely and to fix some of the difficulties experienced in the initial version of YouChat. The second version combines the conversational, generative AI with community-built applications, to offer interactive experiences with each query. And with YouChat's blended language model, it can serve users with charts, images, videos, tables, graphs, text, or code embedded in responses to user queries, intended to reduce the number of tabs open and to stop users from drifting away from the search engine.
Timeline
Further Resources
Former Salesforce chief scientist announces new search engine to take on Google
Ron Miller
Web
December 8, 2020
You.com challenges Google, Microsoft with launch of 'multimodal conversational AI' in search
Web
February 15, 2023
You.com Launches in Beta As a Privacy-Focused Alternative to Google
Web
November 9, 2021
You.com takes aim at Google and Microsoft with multimodal chat search
Ron Miller
Web
February 15, 2023
You.com wants to remake the search engine
Adi Robertson
Web
November 9, 2021