You.com Launches in Beta As a Privacy-Focused Alternative to Google

It’s not each day a brand new search engine comes on-line, however You.com is betting its AI-driven and privacy-focused method can persuade people who it’s higher than Google.

Launching this week as a public beta, You.com is the brainchild of former Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher, who claims his new search engine is constructed on belief, kindness, and details—that’s a lofty declare throughout a time stuffed with a lot misinformation.

“We want to work on having more click trust and less clickbait on the internet,” Socher instructed TechCrunch. 

But sifting by means of all of the content material on the web and delivering helpful search outcomes isn’t straightforward. So to supply extra reliable outcomes, You.com makes use of an AI-powered algorithm that makes use of pure language processing to raised perceive potential queries.

The technique of summarizing outcomes appears to be like to be one in every of You.com’s promoting factors. The firm says its “aim is to make your life easier by summarizing the web for you, eliminating the need to open multiple tabs.” To that finish, You.com additionally allows you to set most popular sources so outcomes from these websites are ranked increased in your searches.

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You.com is a completely ad-free platform—the company claims that it “never sells your data to advertisers or follows you around the internet” and that it will never feature targeted ads. The search engine uses integrated apps from sites like BBC News, Craigslist, and others to make it easier to choose what kind of content you want to see.

You.com also offers a private mode that claims to “never store your queries, preferences or locations.” And even in its less privacy-focused standard mode, You.com uses its IP address (not yours) to send anonymized data in order to populate results from apps and sites such as local weather info and things like nearby restaurants or attractions.

You.com even claims that its operations are carbon neutral thanks to a partnership with Sustain.Life to offset the search engine’s carbon emissions.

However, with out advertisements to generate income, it’s presently unclear what You.com’s enterprise mannequin actually is other than utilizing affiliate hyperlinks to generate a “tiny” quantity of revenues. Socher instructed VentureBeat:

“The first page of Google can only be modified by paying for advertisements, which is both annoying to users and costly for companies. Our new platform will enable companies to contribute their most useful actual content to that first page, and—if users like it—they can take an action right then and there. Most companies and partners will prefer this new interface to people’s digital lives over the old status quo of Google.”

You.com is currently in beta, so there are a lot of critical features still in development. The search engine is currently only able to support English language searches and U.S.-focused apps, and the site is prioritizing its desktop web experience while it works on mobile optimization.

But if you wish to attempt You.com out for your self, you may set up its Chrome extension or set it as your default search engine in all of right now’s hottest browsers (other than Safari). You.com does notice that you simply’ll get the “best experience” utilizing Brave.