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Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs

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Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs

#61

Post by j0e1 »

Congratulations on the beta launch! I am all for privacy-friendly search engines.

My 2-cents is default to the familiar list view for search results. The current card-view makes it cumbersome to navigate (horizontal and vertical scroll) and scanning screen-width end-to-end. And with my penchant to serially browse results, it can result in me over-spending time to find what I need. Also, it would force you to have a tighter ranking of results. The current view could still be an option.

Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs

#62

Post by DevX101 »

richardsocher wrote: post #39
srhngpr wrote: post #28

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.

Yea... Requiring the default was a tough choice. 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.c…

What's the unofficial requirements to become a default search engine in the major browsers?

Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs

#63

Post by option_greek »

slipperlobster wrote: post #51

I pulled up your main page on Firefox and just did a search for "asd" - testing it out. Scrolling down a bit to images shows me some definitely NSFW images. If the goal is to be used in the workplace since you mention developer-focused "search-apps" then this is a nonstarter for me. Just a heads up.

Oops. I think its worse than NSFW. It seem to fetch some pics of questionable age :(

Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs

#64

Post by richardsocher »

Tyriar wrote: post #54
richardsocher wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea... Requiring the default was a tough choice. 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.c…

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 d…

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:

https://youdotcom.notion.site/Make-You-com-your-default-sear...

Full FAQ here: https://youdotcom.notion.site/FAQ-8c871d6c99d84e02955fda772a...

Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs

#65

Post by VRay »

chrisMyzel wrote: post #49

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 w…

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

..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!

Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs

#66

Post by richardsocher »

j0e1 wrote: post #61

Congratulations on the beta launch! I am all for privacy-friendly search engines. My 2-cents is default to the familiar list view for search results. The current card-view makes it cumbersome to navigate (horizontal and vertical scroll) and scanning screen-width end-to-end. And with my penchant to serially browse results, it can result in me over-spending time to find what I need. Also, it would force you to have a t…

Yea. We debated this one for a while. There's a "regression to the mean" type of thing going on where every other search engine in the last 20 years just looks like a Google knockoff. We found that many different types of users love the new layout. It allows you zoom into one dimension of your search, e.g. lots of Reddit results or Medium articles and then also quickly skip to the next. It will work well on mobile too (though we're focused on desktop for now) where many users are used to scrolling left/right and up/down in e.g. Instagram.

Depending on your input device, it can be more or less intuitive:

Worst case is folks with a single scroll wheel mouse. There you need to use shift+scroll wheel to move horizontally (that actually works in every app and OS). With trackpads and touch screens it's a lot easier.

For some the layout is busy but especially developers told us they like the higher information density a lot and can avoid opening 20 different tabs to find what they're looking for.

That being said, I understand that it will take some time to adjust to something new and a less-Google-y future.

Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs

#67

Post by chrisMyzel »

VRay wrote: post #65
chrisMyzel wrote: post #49

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 w…

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 ..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+re…

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.

Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs

#68

Post by richardsocher »

DevX101 wrote: post #62
richardsocher wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea... Requiring the default was a tough choice. 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.c…

What's the unofficial requirements to become a default search engine in the major browsers?

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.

Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs

#69

Post by Tyriar »

richardsocher wrote: post #64
Tyriar wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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: https://youdotcom.notion.site/Make-You-com-your-default-sear... Full FAQ here: https://youdotcom…

> 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.

Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs

#70

Post by richardsocher »

slipperlobster wrote: post #51

I pulled up your main page on Firefox and just did a search for "asd" - testing it out. Scrolling down a bit to images shows me some definitely NSFW images. If the goal is to be used in the workplace since you mention developer-focused "search-apps" then this is a nonstarter for me. Just a heads up.

Oh shit! That's bad. That picture seems to have gotten through all the SafeSearch:strict filters.

Sadly, the image search app comes from Bing, so every other non-Google search engine has the same problem with that same single image, e.g.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=asd&t=h_&iax=images&ia=images

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=asd&form=HDRSC2&first=1...

Even in the SafeSearch:strict mode.

I will report it them and I hope they'll fix it soon.

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