For better or worse, You.com isn’t like any other search engine you’ve used before.
Instead of arranging results in a vertical list, you.com presents users with rows of horizontal panels—the company calls them “apps”—grouped by source. There’s an app for Yelp, an app for Reddit, an app for Twitter, and an app for standard Bing results, among others. Users can then promote or demote these panels as they browse the results, creating a search engine that’s personalized around their favorite sources.
But while You.com is both novel and ambitious, it’s also difficult to get used to, and having to sift through a dozen or more content silos can feel counterproductive when not all of them are relevant to what you need. To truly upend the search engine business, You.com will need to do a better job cataloging the entirely new system it’s created.
Disruption with a side of privacy
You.com is part of a broader boom for privacy-centric Google search alternatives, including DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Brave Search, and it’s just as eager to present its privacy bona fides. It doesn’t mine users’ search histories for targeted ads and makes no attempt to track users after they’ve left the site. Users can also toggle an “Incognito” mode, which turns off personalized results but prevents You.com from storing search histories or IP addresses.
Most of You.com’s competitors try to hew close to the Google experience. Their differentiation is not so much in the core search product as it is in the broader suite of tools they offer, such as Brave’s web browser or DuckDuckGo’s email privacy options.
