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

you.com

91–100 of 477 posts

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

#92
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 to…

The problem is that the majority of users will likely bounce right off of such a foreign interface and never come back. Personally, I won't even consider this search engine until there's a less chaotic way to view the results.

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

#94

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... Requiring the default was a tough choice. 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 "…

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.

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

#95

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... Requiring the default was a tough choice. 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 "…

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.

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

#96
post #65

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…

We shouldn't be too hard on these new search engines. My search engine spent a fairly long time returning comically irrelevant search results.

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.

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

#97

I will give it credit for working on firefox with javascript turned off.

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  with source “https://you.com/cdn-cgi/scripts/7d0fa10a/cloudflare-static/rocket-loader.min.js”.

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

#98

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... Requiring the default was a tough choice. 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 "…

I don't use Chrome, I use Firefox. It was confusing for it to ask me to add an extension to Chrome.

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

#100
post #62

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?

You contact the company and offer to pay them hundreds of millions of dollars a year (see Google and Safari and Firefox).

Smaller browsers (if they at all exist) will default to Google because that's what users expect. Except Edge. Edge will stick to Bing.

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