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U.com founder Richard Socher knows his company has always been the David to go after Goliath in search, Google and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft. He likes to point out that his company launched generative AI-based search in December, several months before other search giants announced it.
Today, the company is announcing that it’s building on that start with multimodal search. That means it can add elements beyond text to help answer a question more accurately. So ask a question like ‘Which company has the most CRM market share’, you’ll get the answer ‘Salesforce’, and ‘Salesforce’s stock price?’ If you follow the , you will get a stock chart instead. Text based answer.
Socher says this is a huge leap forward for chat-based search, and puts the company ahead of its larger competitors. “Instead of generating a bunch of numbers that other language models do, we show you our stock app in the conversation,” Socher told TechCrunch.
He believes it is a more effective way to answer that type of question and these different methods can be applied to other questions depending on the context. “It’s a big step to find big language models. Different methods are text, but also code, but also tables, and also graphs and images and interactive elements – and sometimes it’s the best way to answer. Your question. The answer to this question is better than any text. I really believe in representation,” he said.
You.com displays charts or other elements to help answer a question more than text. Image Credits: You.com
U.com launched in late 2020 believing there was room for another search engine, one more AI-based. This is the idea that the search market is connected to, but Socher sees a new approach, which the existing authorities cannot provide.
U.com wants to be anti-Google, he told TechCrunch during the company’s $25 million funding round last summer:
“Google is a monolithic, monopolistic search engine, it’s closed and ultimately weaponized AI against users to serve its true purpose. We’re building You.com as a search platform that’s open and serving user needs directly with You.com apps, rather than scaring people with ads,” Kyle Wiegers told TechCrunch at the time.
Socher declined to discuss the technology behind his company’s search at this time, out of concern that competitors could use it against him, but said that at some point he will reveal the secret sauce he uses to build his company’s search solution.
“We don’t share exactly how we built it right now. I know a lot of people are very curious about how we’re building all of this. But many people are trying to copy what we do. And it doesn’t make sense to share all of our technology or even high-level or details on how we do it, at least until we’re either live or profitable by default.
The company claims to be experiencing double-digit percentage growth every month and now has millions of people using its website every day. They’re still figuring out how to monetize, but it won’t be like Google or Bing.
“We should not earn 500 million dollars a day. As a startup, we don’t have that pressure right now. But this year we will think about monetization and will try to explore different avenues,” he said. This includes personal ads, subscriptions that help users write essays and blog posts twice a week, and you can open up the platform to build third-party apps like the Stock app. Stock chart.
“You can allow that third-party app to sell only one service, and if that’s relevant to the user, and the user wants to buy whatever that company is selling, then we’re going to cut it. So the end of the fund is monetization rather than the beginning of the fund, which is what ads do,” he said.
He certainly recognizes some fierce competition again, but believes You.com has found a way to differentiate itself from its competitors.
“It’s really a tough space to compete in, and you need to build something unique and different, but at the same time it’s big enough to capture most of what people want from a search engine these days,” he said.
That’s what we’ve done, and that’s part of where we’ve been able to grow and give you a new perspective on what a search engine can or can do for you.
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