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The appetite for alternative search engines is growing. At least, that’s the argument Richard Socher, Salesforce’s former chief scientist, likes to make. In the year In 2020, Socher created a search engine that helps you understand search queries, rank the results, and parse queries into different languages (including programming languages). It aggregates data from around the web and offers built-in apps like Twitter’s search tools that allow users to complete tasks without ever leaving the results page.
There seems to be some truth to his words. Socher says you have hundreds of thousands of users with 70% subscriber growth last month and 30% monthly growth in unique searches. That compares to the world’s most popular search engines (ie, Google, Bing) with hundreds of millions of users, and Soccer draws attention to your retention rate. 50 percent of people who make you their default search engine continue to use it after the fact.
The number is of interest to investors. Today, they closed a $25 million funding round led by Radical Ventures with participation from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, Breyer Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Day One Ventures. That brings the startup’s total revenue to $45 million, which Socher says will be used to develop core features and partner with outside developers to “show more useful functional apps” on your search results page.
“We envision You.com to be the most open search platform we’ve ever built, allowing others to build on it. Data transparency, user customization, summarization, privacy and state-of-the-art search are the foundation of the platform, and we’ve won Google over the long haul by empowering the world to co-build the next search experience,” Socher told TechCrunch in an email interview. . “Google is a monolithic, monopolistic search engine, it’s closed and it’s finally turned AI on users for its real purpose, which is advertising. Instead of bombarding people with ads, we’re building You.com apps as an open search platform that highlights user interests.
Image Credits: You.com
Socher previously founded MetaMind, an AI startup that was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. Salesforce, Socher helped build the company He worked on the pervasive Einstein AI platform and natural language processing research with Brian McCann, the second co-founder.
Unsurprisingly given Socher’s data science background, you’ll find plenty of AI-enabled features sprinkled throughout the search experience. Ucode, which just launched today, can generate code online with GitHub’s Copilot based on a search query. And the recently launched YouWrite, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3, can be inspired to write essays, blog posts and boilerplate letters.
Socher sees apps, not ads, as the core of your growth – a twist on the traditional search engine formula. (For most of Google’s ad revenue -$256.73 billion in 2021.) While it doesn’t block ads, they offer a “Private Mode” that doesn’t store queries, preferences, IP addresses, or location data, and doesn’t anonymize you. Request data is sent to your third party partners.
“Our private mode offers the most private search experience of any search engine. Users can request that their data be removed and have full transparency about how.” [and] What data will be used, “Socher understands. “As much as possible, the future is not on applications, but on ads, and we believe that the economy will be more and more the ability to talk.”
Sure, you’re putting your money where your mouth is, investing heavily in experiences like the aforementioned YouCode. In addition to generating code, Ucode also finds code snippets from sources such as Stack Overflow and GitHub and filters results relevant to a specific development environment and software stack. A special preview panel displays high-level information from documents published online, built-in tools can validate JSON files and generate color codes in HEX, RGB and HSV.
With most of your apps built in-house, the next step is exposing the platform to third parties, says Socher. In the future, you’ll open access to its datasets and custom search technology so developers can build on top of their internal data. At that point, they can start charging for internal developer expertise, such as API access, “advanced” and “personalized” text and code generation, and out-of-the-box search support.
Image Credits: You.com
Whether your business model will be a winner remains to be seen. Other under-the-radar search engines, like Neva, are taking different routes to monetization and charging for search results. Still others have struggled to find a reliable source of income – Quill, founded by ex-Google engineers, raised $33 million in capital before shutting down in 2010, after just over 2 years in business.
In any case, to Socher’s earlier point, ads may not be the preferred way for search engine startups to make money. At the corporate level, privacy-enhancing features like Apple’s app tracking transparency could disrupt the behind-the-scenes mechanics of many ads, while regulators in the U.S. and abroad are seeing limits on the amount of data advertisers can collect for targeting purposes — making some ad products less attractive.
He took a dig at U.com’s main rivals. . “A better search engine is possible – better privacy, better results for professionals like coders, less ads, more social results, less SEO sites, more choice and agency for people in the ranks.”
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