
You.com hits the market to rival Google
Have you heard of You.com? Maybe not, but internet users are already familiar with several search platforms, such as Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Aol, and so on, but without a doubt, the most famous of them is Google, which really dominates the market. To give you an idea, in 2020 alone, Google held 86,64% of the search engine market, generating revenues of US$ 146,9 billion, according to data from Forbes.
However, this new platform promises to be a big name to rival this giant. Maybe, in a while, instead of saying that it will give you a Google, you will start saying that doing it will “give you a You.com”
See what's new this new search engine brings to users, especially with the appeal of focusing on privacy.
What is You.com?
With funding led by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and other firms including Breyer Capital, Day One Ventures and other Silicon Valley businesses, You.com bills itself as the world's first open, ad-free, privacy-focused search engine.
To provide more reliable data, the you.com uses an algorithm based on Artificial Intelligence (Einstein), which uses natural language processing to better understand what the user wants.
The first difference with You.com is its interface design, which presents search results in cards, in a row of horizontal panels, rather than in a vertical list, as on Google. On this platform, results are always presented in blocks and with images, grouped by source.
This allows users to create a personalized navigation mechanism based on their favorite sources. According to the developers, this new approach is due to the perception that users' searches are increasingly concentrated on a smaller number of larger websites.
Leaving these searches in horizontal cards is also a way to facilitate the process of finding the desired information.
Additionally, from the results page, users can move the panels up or down according to the sort they want.
Search results are extracted from YouTube videos or posts on social media apps (Linkedin, Reddit, Tik Tok or Twitter). For the developers of the new search platform, each app is a slice and represents a dimension of the internet.
Another very interesting point is that users can give positive or negative feedback on the results of searches, triggering the machine learning process and making it possible to improve future searches, thus putting decisions in the hands of users and not just AI.

Privacy is the focus at You.com
One of the main reasons why You.com attracts users is that it never sells data to advertisers or follows users around the internet. This means that it does not store preferences, queries or locations. To achieve this, it offers an optional “incognito mode”. In normal search mode, it collects data to personalize results, but does not target any ads to the user.
This point is very important to the developers of You.com. According to an interview with the Washington Post, Salesforce co-founder and CEO Richard Socher claims that Google is invading privacy to get more and more performance, and that is not what You.com wants.
It is not yet known how the platform will make money without advertising, but the initiative has already received an initial investment of US$20 million from associated companies. According to the managers, the intention is to find new business models without involving the use of data to capitalize.
Features are being improved
As it is still in beta, the platform still has many features under development. For now, it is prioritizing the desktop web experience, but the company has already announced that it is working on the mobile format.
This is an interesting measure because the results of searches on cards are more effective on larger screens, making viewing on cell phones a little difficult.
For those who are used to other search engines, this new format may still be a little challenging, and it will require a bit of mental adaptation.
However, anyone who wants to try You.com can install its Chrome extension and set it as the default search engine in all popular browsers.