HN user

richardsocher

263 karma

CEO at you.com

https://twitter.com/RichardSocher

Posts2
Comments192
View on HN

If there's a lot of interest, we'd be happy to offer a monthly paid plan also. It's interesting. Only on HN do we hear users asking to pay for an otherwise free service. Majority of our users everywhere else would never pay for search.

youChat will get a lot better in the coming months

I think it would be wonderful!

Richard from you.com here.

Hey,

Yea. These are valid concerns. We care a lot about privacy and are making public statements and commitments to it.

Technically any privacy-focused business (proton, ddg, etc) could pivot and change their mind but the hope is that by starting with those commitments potential future shareholders would understand that the erosion of trust would hurt the brand and not push for it?

Richard from you.com here.

We want to stay free and open to everyone so we will explore private ads (not user dependent, only based on query, not tracking, similar to DDG) and useful monetized apps like youWrite or youImagine (ie stable diffusion).

If there's enough interest, we can also open up a paid account without ads.

Do you have ideas for how we can make the citations more likely to be used?

It does seem like the biggest failure cases of chat are happening when we have not yet incorporated one of our apps (like weather or directions).

Richard from YOU here.

I'm gonna throw you.com (i'm a co-founder) into that mix. We've been growing a lot and have a private mode that stores nothing at all.

What audit would you suggest for us to prove that statement? It would be great to have a some independent party verify this.

Good time to switch to a search engine that has code snippets, coding tutorials, AI code completion, AI blog writing, a useful yelp app, great privacy, gives control over the sources and apps I want to see and summarizes pros/cons for products.

you.com

(founder here :)

Richard, CEO of you.com here. Love your two points. That's what we're doing!

For 1) we have an open app platform that allows everybody to collaborate on that first entry of the web

For 2) We let people decide the sources they want to see and if they don't like a source or app, they can downvote it and see it less in their ranker.

We will try to decentralize more over time though it's a big effort to make it fast enough still.

CEO of you.com here. We decided that one way to avoid this long term is to let users decide on their favorite sources and apps.

I have done a lot of research in AI and it can certainly do a lot of things implicitly but some oversight and explicit user feedback is useful also.

SearchHut 4 years ago

I love your post. I have to say that my experience is that many in the HN community are not nearly as kind as you. Folks here will rip you apart if you don't have everything figured out :(

So, I started rolling out new features of our search engine on Twitter, Slack, etc instead of here.

SearchHut 4 years ago

Richard, CEO at you.com here.

Users vote on their own preferences... not on other users' preferences. so i dont see how it will be gamed unless we start incorporating user preferences into global ones - which we would only do if we thought it worked better and isn't being gamed.

SearchHut 4 years ago

That's our strategy at you.com - we start with the most popular sites, crawl them and build apps for them, eg. you.com/apps and let users vote in search results.

Full disclosure: I'm the CEO.