Even in "private mode" (not enabled by default), if I search "squid game mask" it hits maps.googleapis.com with my entire user agent string.
How is this private? Perhaps a bug?
Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs
431–440 of 477 posts
Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs
#432I've always wanted a search engine that searched mainly (only?) Stack Overflow, Reddit, and a handful of other authentic sites. One note: You.com seems to include Stack Overflow scrapers in the results. Would be better with those removed. These two results go the same content, one on SO and one scraped from it: https://i.imgur.com/TwvDIiC.png
Kagi Search will let you do that by allowing you to create "lenses" like "programming" etc. https://kagi.com
Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs
#433If 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?
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,…
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.
Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Hi Tyriar, 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 s…
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.
Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs
#435I know you had a bad day today Richard Socher. I am sorry for that. Reading through these comments must have hurt, and in some strange "The Egg" [1] way hurt me too. I felt as everyone that left a bad comment, and I felt as you, receiving all this. And all that after finally releasing the beta of your product, having worked very hard for that. I am impressed by your stoic attitude and not caving in under all this pre…
Thanks a bunch. We had so much positivity on all other platforms but things here did get very toxic and personal - which was a first for me :( We still listen to our users and dropped the extension requirement. Folks assume a lot of bad intent from us even though Chrome clearly states that the extension only has write access to one field and no other permissions. We'll improve and learn from this. We're a super small…
>Folks assume a lot of bad intent from us even though Chrome clearly states that the extension only has write access to one field and no other permissions.
No, it's that we see similarities to that which has burned us before.
The insistence on an extension is one example, sure, but there's also the lack of clear answers to questions people have posed about how you intend to handle monetization/selling of user data in the future (and the wording you've used so far regarding it), questions around data currently being sent to third-parties while using You's "private mode", and that you essentially tried gaslighting a community of people that would know better[1].
I'm not saying your intent is bad, I'm saying you came to a community that is inherently less trusting about this kind of tech and while they may have shot from the hip (albeit with valid questions/concerns), you haven't done much to assuage those concerns.
Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they published the extension source that might be more reasonable. I assume the extension is so a lot of heavy lifting on hitting individual apps/ API's happens locally to alleviate costs or rate limiting
Working on it right now :) Extension changes your navbar setting. It's 33kB. All the heavy lifting happens on our servers so as to not slow browsers down for users.
sorry you got downvoted so much! But would be great to know the purpose of the extension, and why the service can't work without it
Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. StackOverflow (with code snippets), W3Schools, MDN, Copilot-like Cod…
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: https://www.google.com/search?q=remove+w3schools+from+search... In that context, it see…
Yea. All sources and apps can be preferred or disliked and that will impact the ranking.
StackOverflow might be more popular :)
You can test your json files to see if they're valid via the json checker app.
Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs
#438Hi Richard, Please feel free to respond to as many questions as you have time for. 1. I'm a huge fan of your ML work while you were at Stanford. If I may steal a minute or two from you, I'd like to ask, why do you think recursive neural networks have lost out to other architectures (basically transformers) when it comes to NLP, where intuition would suggest the composionality of language would favor recursive NNs? Do…
Great deep questions :)
1. The driving force behind neural net architecture choice right now is hardware architecture. The model that can be trained with more data and more parameters, will win over any other model. Parallelization is amazing. I do think they'll make a comeback when people try to do more high level reasoning and try to learn that.
2. I do mean it in several senses. We looked into neural net algos for summarization but they often produce outputs that sound good but might not be factual. The other problem is that when you search for "best thai restaurants near me" you don't want a nnet lm - generated text. Most ppl would prefer a list of tiles with restaurants and important facts about them. So the models will need to be multimodal. Lastly, each app is essentially one dimension of looking at a query/topic. You can always "zoom" into each dimension more by swiping left/right or choose a different way of looking at this query by swiping up/down.
3. They do have all the talent but it's hard to copy privacy features for Google because they make too much money "selling" it to advertisers (ie making it accessible to hyper target people everywhere online/on the phone/etc). It'll also be hard to copy our entire design and apps and give people agency because they hyper optimized their design for maximizing ad revenue. They also won't open up their platform to let anybody contribute or people decide the order of their results. Etc.... So... I'm just a little worried, not too much :)
Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs
#439If I recall correctly, Google was very successful at the beginning because of their instant results coming back in a dead simple list of links and some details. When I searched on you.com, I got these ugly pulsating placeholders, and then could smell the oily engines in my device whirring up to send that damn heavy AJAX query to let me wait another 2 seconds to get something displayed. I like the idea, and wish a lot…
Thanks for your feedback.
I agree.
Our first beta, especially with massive traffic right now, is too slow. We'll work on speed. Better, better, never done.
Re: Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs
#440Why is a first and last name required to sign up? It is an odd choice for a company that prides itself "superior privacy choices"
Agreed.
We'll implement new more anonymous sign up options in the future.
It's just our first public beta release... maybe too soon for hackernews?