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

you.com

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

#101

Post by dmitriid »

richardsocher wrote: post #53
jccalhoun wrote: post #34

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 monopo…

> We aren't doing that and not planning to.

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.

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

#102

Post by LouisSayers »

Wow, it's like a blast from the past on mobile - like some old school search engine with loads of stuff on the screen, it's hard to know where to look.

On the homepage I see some ex-salesforce big shot founded this...

I worked at a company for a month with an ex-bigshot Sales force person who was basically a sociopath. Maybe it's not fair to compare, but this gives me those same vibes.

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

#103

Post by marginalia_nu »

Congratulations. I like the layout.

Although the page loads extremely slowly, I'm on a modern Ryzen 3, on a 100 mbit connection and my computer is really struggling to load the page. Like it takes nearly 5 seconds and I can't imagine what is taking so long to present the search bar with no search results.

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

#104

Post by jjulius »

m-i-l wrote: post #88
jasonpeacock wrote: post #11

If it's free for users, then that usually means you're selling user data to create income. How is You making money without Ads and without selling user data?

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.

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

#105

Post by techbio »

richardsocher wrote: post #66
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 to…

I understand the concept, but there have been several search engines that return a richer UI, the name "Clusty" comes to mind among others, and Google did not invent the relevance-sorted list, just [famously] improved relevancy.

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

#107

Post by noduerme »

Question about a key UX decision: Why do all the search results open in a new tab with target="_blank"? This is the only search engine I can think of that has this behavior. I find it pesky from a user's point of view. If I want new tabs I can command-click the link.

As it is, the UI doesn't provide the user any way to navigate away from You.com when opening a search result. I've always viewed new-tab links to be a kind of "sneaky" way to inflate engagement metrics, but I think it's particularly negative for usability on a search engine.

[edit] Even odder, clicking the You logo in the upper-left corner of the search results page opens the You.com homepage in a new tab. What is the purpose of that?

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

#108

Post by the_jeremy »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #60

I'd like to know more about the "built for devs" concept you are presenting to us. What does that mean to you? For me personally, I rarely perform site:github.com or site:stackoverflow.com searches in my browser's default search engine. I typically just enter a few keywords and try to make sense of what I find. When I personally think of a search engine built for devs, I think of one that parses queries differently f…

SymbolHound (http://symbolhound.com/) is the only one I've found that doesn't ignore special characters.

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

#109

Post by jsnell »

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 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.

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