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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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(?)
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])
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
476 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadMy 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
https://www.reuters.com/technology/salesforce-ceo-benioff-in...
Not a great first impression for the Hacker News crowd.
The text around the plugin is misleading. Strike 1 IMHO.
We hope we can drop all restrictions in the future.
but we listen, so we dropped the requirement entirely.
happy open searching
I want to like this, but this move seems like just another scummy "growth hack".
It's a bit needy. Maybe give people a chance to try it out on their own terms instead of forcing them to commit right off the bat?
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 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.
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.
Edit: it badgers me to install it in Chrome even in mobile Safari.
Edit 2: seems there is a search box on top of the page. It works but I didn't notice it initially because
- the page was so intensely focused on getting me to install a Chrome extension (both in Firefox on iOS and Safari on iOS)
- and the placeholder text ("you.com")looked like a decoration initially (try something like "type here" or something)
I also have privacy.resistFingerprinting enabled, maybe the other commenter does too, and that might muck with things.
Just tested and my reported user-agent is: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0"
How is You making money without Ads and without selling user data?
The best way to remove this question is for browsers to be zero-telemetry which is what I was advocating for.
How would you complete with this? Why would anyone spend 10x on you to get the same conversions?
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.
https://www.notion.so/youdotcom/Setting-You-com-as-your-defa...
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.
We describe the steps for all the different browsers in the first link of our FAQ:
https://youdotcom.notion.site/Make-You-com-your-default-sear...
Full FAQ here: https://youdotcom.notion.site/FAQ-8c871d6c99d84e02955fda772a...
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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?)
you be a programmable search engine? (then --> [1])
[1] https://get-sentinel.io
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?
[0] https://github.com/tycrek/degoogle#web-based-products
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 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.
Yes, and it seems to be spreading faster than COVID. If only we could quarantine and vaccinate web developers who come up with ideas like this.
Web results by themselves are a mixed bag, which is why we built out lots of custom apps for developers, e.g.
StackOverflow (with code snippets), W3Schools, MDN, Copilot-like Code Completion, json checkers.
You can find the list of apps in our FAQ: https://youdotcom.notion.site/FAQ-8c871d6c99d84e02955fda772a...
https://www.google.com/search?q=remove+w3schools+from+search...
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.
You can test your json files to see if they're valid via the json checker app.
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?
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.
Smaller browsers (if they at all exist) will default to Google because that's what users expect. Except Edge. Edge will stick to Bing.
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.
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.
Personally I like it! Going to try it for a bit.
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.
We have !waves (similar to !bangs) and support natively domain blocklisting.
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.
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.
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.
Chris
[1] https://get-sentinel.io/ [2] https://medium.com/@get_sentinel/a-i-might-make-humans-happi...
..holey moley, I just found something that works! I bookmarked a super weird search engine someone linked here a while back, and it actually returned useful search results immediately: https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=pancake+recipe&pro...
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!
Building a search engine is easy enough. Getting it to return good results is the 10% of the work that takes 90% of the time.