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| You.com wants to reshape your search engine |
Google determines the way billions of people think about facts and data. For many years it has been organized on the basis of the principle of "the only right answer". The central idea behind this principle is that most people look in short segments. The facts are the best answer.
But this is not the only way to surf the Internet. A company called You.com tries to serve different things through a search engine based on sorting and comparing results.
Founded by two former Salesforce employees, You.com has opened a public beta and announced $20 million in funding led by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
The service rejects the linear link list that you can find on most public search engines and chooses a response grid ordered by source.
Sources include general categories such as web results and news, as well as specific sites such as StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Twitter, Amazon, LinkedIn, and individual news sites such as the New York Times.
In addition to this organizational change, the unique feature of You.com is that it allows people to influence the sources they see.
You can "vote" and "vote against" certain categories. Therefore, when searching, you will see your favorite sources first, then neutral searches, and finally sources that get low votes.
The category is also affected by the search context. Some of these searches produce results very similar to Google's search engine. However, the user interface encourages browsing a number of sources rather than clicking on previous links.
Also includes great tools for specific use cases. For example, a JavaScript search loop calls a list of pages referenced by Google.
However, You.com does show real syntax snippets from sources like W3Schools which you can simply copy and paste.
An alternative to the real Google answer
You.com is not as optimized as Google to answer basic questions, especially queries that require guessing what people want instead of what they literally type.
And this site is more than ready to trick people into clicking on other pages. It does not include small features such as providing answers in the search bar.
The service seems to be more honest than Google about its limitations. Google snippets are arguably the worst feature of the platform. They mistakenly provide inaccurate or offensive information that is effective, intriguing, and even summarizes incorrectly accurate answers.
You.com provides a quick info box for queries on topics such as the distance from the Earth to the Moon. But it was presented with many other results.
You.com is poised to become a search engine that can help the savvy web search user looking to compare multiple sources of information.
The site is still missing important features like searching for a limited time. That happened shortly after that, co-founder and CEO Richard Socher said.
Services like DuckDuckGo and Brave Search are trying to shake off Google's dominance in search. You.com emphasizes its idea of being more private and less haunted.
The website does not support ads and has an incognito mode which says your IP address will be hidden. Among other things, the company promises not to address users with personalized ads.