We've just incorporated our Stackoverflow app into you.com/chat Would love to get your feedback.

Few details but sounds a little like what we've just launched at you.com?

Just gave "YouChat" a go, and it stands up very well against ChatGPT. Very nice.

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.

I think gradient on results page are distracting. You guys should do some UI review of results page. For me it's too distracting and hard to read the results. Same with the logos at bottom they steal all attention.

EDIT: Kagi beats you hard on this EDIT2: More criticism. I feel like I am reading 10 lines at once of your menu instead of results. Move it to right/top, add padding, border or something like this. Also font is like from those cheap websites that spam.

Thanks. We'll look into both of these (plans and design).

Maybe consider making an "ad-supported, free" model, and a "premium" plan without ads? As long as advertising doesn't end up in the premium plan at any point it's the best of both worlds.

Sorry, the model is not yet self-aware nor aware of you.com - We will feed it better information about ourselves soon.

For now, you can read about all the answers on of FAQ site: https://about.you.com/ - which will soon get a design overhaul also... The joys of a startup.

# Richard from you.com here.

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.

Does that allay OPs concerns though? What happens if tracking-based ads are significantly more profitable than private ones (probably the case, based on the huge revenues of Google/Meta)? How high would the paid account fees need to be to offset the ad revenue?

What happens if you.com is very successful and goes public, so that the pressure to squeeze out as much money as possible slowly erodes the original good intention?

(I appreciate that you took the time to respond to this btw, super cool to be able to interact directly! The magic of HN.)

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?

Thanks Richard

Personally I’d pay for it but I’m sure monetization is far more complicated. Hopefully you will have a breakthrough app (or two).

Yea, anybody can build a breakthrough app for you.com to show in the SERP: https://you.com/developers

We hope to grow this new kind of search engine/portal together with the community and then incorporate chat+apps+links into a new kind of experience.

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.

It would be great if when clicking through the link, the relevant text could be highlighted in the webpage, similar to the featured snippets in Google search. E.g. when searching "What were the causes of the swiss civil war?" Google returns:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Swiss_Confederacy#:~:text=....

Great idea! We'll look into that.

Happy to answer questions that folks have here. (founder here)

you.com CEO here. We let people give feedback on which major content blocks they want to see and soon will let developers add their own search-apps also. We believe in an open platform you can control, for the future of search.

We're growing a lot at you.com

Hey Richard, great to hear you guys are doing well! A search engine with more personal control over rests is certainly attractive.

My intention wasn't to dismiss the possibility of popular new search engines. Only to highlight that the environment is substantially more complex/challenging than in 1997.