Google Search organizes the best way billions of individuals take into consideration info and information, and for years, it’s been organized round a principle dubbed “one true answer”: the concept most individuals are in search of one thing greatest answered by a succinct factual snippet. But that’s not the one approach individuals may navigate the online, and right now, an organization known as You.com is attempting one thing totally different: a search engine constructed round sorting and evaluating outcomes.

You.com, based by two former Salesforce staff, is opening right now in public beta and saying a $20 million funding spherical led by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. The service abandons the linear listing of hyperlinks you’ll discover in most general-purpose serps, choosing a grid of solutions organized by supply. The sources embrace generic classes like “web results” and “news” but additionally particular websites like StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Twitter, Amazon, LinkedIn, and particular person information websites like The New York Times.

On prime of this organizational change, You.com’s massive differentiating characteristic is that it lets individuals affect which sources they see. You can “upvote” and “downvote” particular classes, so while you run searches, you’ll see most popular sources first, impartial searches subsequent, and downvoted sources final.

When I looked for “Section 230” on You.com’s pre-launch beta, as an illustration, it defaulted to exhibiting a field of common “web results” first, together with hyperlinks to Cornell University and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But I may additionally choose to see one thing like a Wikipedia snippet or a collection of Reddit outcomes first. The classes are additionally influenced by the context of your search. If I searched “Moonfall” it could favor an IMDb-powered “What to Watch” field for the upcoming Roland Emmerich movie, whereas trying up “infrastructure bill” prioritized a common information grid and media protection from many various retailers.

Some of those searches — just like the Section 230 one — in the end floor fairly related outcomes to Google. But the interface encourages trying throughout a variety of sources somewhat than clicking the primary one or two hyperlinks. It additionally consists of attention-grabbing instruments for particular use circumstances. Searching “for loop javascript,” as an illustration, will summon lists of reference pages on Google, however You.com will floor precise plaintext snippets of syntax from sources like W3Schools which you could simply copy and paste.

You.com isn’t optimized for answering primary questions the best way Google is, particularly for queries that require guessing what individuals need as a substitute of what they actually sort. It’s much more keen to encourage clicking via to different pages — in order for you the “actor who plays Sherlock Holmes,” You.com will ship hyperlinks to lists whereas Google offers you a grid of film stars. It doesn’t embrace little options like providing solutions within the search bar.

And You.com is mostly worse at guiding your eye to essentially the most related info. If you’re not used to carefully studying the textual content of search outcomes, it seems overwhelming and type of cluttered. I solely used a desktop model of the prelaunch beta, which looks like the best way it’s supposed to be skilled however isn’t essentially the place most individuals wish to search the online.

But the service appears way more sincere about its personal limitations than Google. Google’s textual content snippets are arguably the platform’s worst characteristic, granting a false sense of authoritativeness to inaccurate or offensive info and even summarizing an correct reply in a dangerously wrong way. (Full disclosure: I may solely discover that final hyperlink via Google, the place I obtained it by looking down “google seizure snippet,” whereas You.com supplied common details about snippets and seizures.) You.com does supply a “Quick Facts” field for queries like “distance from the Earth to the Moon,” but it surely’s delivered alongside a bunch of different outcomes.

You.com comes tantalizingly near being an engine for internet search energy customers who like evaluating a number of sources of data. It’s nonetheless lacking key options like looking inside a restricted date vary, one thing co-founder and CEO Richard Socher says is coming later, and it’s not as all-purpose as Google. (Clicking the closed beta’s Maps icon truly simply directs you to Google Maps.) But that’s a part of the attraction — Socher fairly describes You.com as “unbundling” search from a Google-style internet empire.

Weirdly, the corporate doesn’t make this pitch very nicely in its launch announcement. It describes its system as “summarizing results from across the web,” which feels virtually exactly backward. Socher says the phrase refers to You.com’s grouping of outcomes by supply, however in comparison with Google, it options virtually no express editorial summarizing of data.

Like DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, and different companies attempting to chip away at Google’s overwhelming dominance in search, You.com emphasizes the concept it’s extra non-public and fewer closely tracked. It’s not supported by adverts and linked with numerous tie-in merchandise the best way Google is, and there’s an incognito mode that You.com says hides your IP deal with. Among different issues, it guarantees that it’ll by no means goal personalised adverts at customers. The service, sadly, doesn’t have a enterprise mannequin in any respect but, nevertheless, so it’s not clear what sort of different tradeoffs it might need to make sooner or later.

You.com in all probability received’t attraction to everybody, but it surely’s providing an attention-grabbing and pretty distinctive characteristic set. It’s one of many uncommon non-subject-specific serps that avoids feeling like a extra principled however virtually inferior model of Google — encouraging enthusiastic about the online as an precise community of internet sites, not simply grist for a solution field.