While most Google alternatives differentiate themselves from the search giant by doubling down on privacy, You.com is taking a different approach.
The startup’s big idea is that web search would be better with apps, which can appear on results pages as interactive widgets or informational panels. Search for a place to eat, for instance, and you might see a carousel of restaurants from Yelp. Search for “AI art generator,” and you’ll see a prompt for creating images using Stable Diffusion.
After a year of building more than 200 of these apps on its own, You.com is now opening up its platform to third-party developers, letting them build their own search apps. Richard Socher, You.com’s founder and CEO, says the goal is to create a Google rival that’s not only more private, but more open for app makers and more customizable for users.
“In order to make a fairer portal to the internet—which is essentially what search engines are these days—I think you need to allow everyone to collaborate and participate in that,” he says.
Search with a side of apps
Integrating apps into a search engine is trickier than it might sound.
For any given search, You.com’s algorithms have to decide whether an app is relevant enough to show. Not every decision is as obvious as displaying Yelp results when a user types “tacos near me,” and you can’t guarantee the apps you’re hoping to see will actually show up. Socher says this is a non-trivial challenge on the technical side.
“You have to learn how to rank not just the apps themselves, but every tile and all the content within each app without having built it yourself,” he says.
To that end, You.com also puts an emphasis on user controls. For any app that appears in search results, users can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to help influence the rankings in future searches. Tapping an app’s ellipses button reveals even more options, such as the ability to block an app entirely.
You.com also has an app store, of sorts, appearing at the bottom of every results page. From there, you can browse for additional sources to run your query through. If you search for Call of Duty, for instance, you might want to quickly search YouTube and Twitch. And if you frequently search for news, you can add carousels for specific sources, such as the Associated Press or the New York Times.
This doesn’t always work the way you might want. Adding or upvoting an app to one search, for instance, doesn’t ensure that it’ll appear for similar searches, and while you can pin certain apps to a sidebar menu for quick access, I’ve had trouble getting certain sources (such as Yelp) to appear there.
Over time, though, the idea is that You.com’s algorithms will learn from users’ behavior, and the site will get better at surfacing the apps that people want to see. That, in turn, will reward developers who create the most useful apps.
“We’re definitely going to rank higher apps that are providing value to users,” Socher says. “If you just create a massive banner ad for your site, everyone’s going to downvote the app, and you’re going to disappear from the app store.”
Incentivizing search apps
As You.com refines its algorithms, it also has to convince developers that building their own search apps is worthwhile in the first place.
The site has amassed more than 1 million active users since it launched last year, but the company won’t say how frequently those users actually visit. It’s backed by $45 million in venture funding, with Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff among its investors. (Prior to founding You.com, Socher was Salesforce’s Chief Scientist.)
Socher acknowledges that the site is still too small to attract bigger companies—You.com won’t say how frequently its 1 million active users actually visit the site—but he notes that more than 500 developers have applied to build their own apps so far. You.com has chosen 15 of them to include at the outset, including the podcast search engine ListenNotes, the comparison shopping site Price.com, and an AI tool called Looria that summarizes product reviews. Another 130 apps are on the way.
For those smaller companies, You.com offers a handful of incentives, the most basic being more exposure to the product or service in question. The site also offers affiliate revenue sharing when users purchase a product through an app’s search results, and it plans to offer in-search subscriptions as well. Already, You.com offers its own AI-based writing tool, which requires a subscription for unlimited use, and Socher says it’s generating thousands of dollars in revenue per week. He envisions offering similar subscription tools to other apps.
“If you build something that a lot of people would like to use more frequently than once or twice, then you can make money with it,” he says.
Eventually, You.com plans to show ads in its search results as well. Similar to ads on other privacy-centric search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Brave, these will be based on users’ current search keywords, not on their search history. (Unlike those search engines, You.com does keep a record of users’ search histories by default, but it does not sell users’ data and it offers a “private mode” that users can toggle on and off, similar to the incognito mode of a web browser.)
Still, Socher stresses that You.com’s apps themselves are not advertisements, and developers aren’t paying for placement.
“They’re just trying to be useful,” he says. “So, if you don’t like them, you can actually decrease the frequency that the app appears or block it forever.”
The anti-Google
As of now, You.com still feels a bit like a proof of concept. Load times are noticeably slower than Google, and having to constantly finesse the search algorithm with upvotes and downvotes can get tiresome.
And yet, there’s something compelling about the idea of an expandable search engine, one that pulls in rich results from the apps and services you actually care about. If You.com can succeed in bringing developers on board and get better at integrating them with search results, it may finally have a Google alternative worth using for reasons other than privacy.
“We’re thinking about not just a search engine, but ultimately, a do engine,” Socher says.
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