We have all heard that Microsoft’s Bing got the ChatGPT-powered answers in its search results. However, what went under the radar is the same capability from You.com that was launched a few months before, in December of 2022 — which I’m sure is related to the fact that the little-known search engine doesn’t have the Redmond giant’s PR budget.
And now You.com is upping the game with a multimodal search of its own. This means that it can add elements beyond text to help answer a question more precisely.
For instance, you can ask You.com a question like “Which company has the most CRM market share,” to get the answer “Salesforce.” Then, you can follow up with “What is Salesforce’s stock price?” and get a stock chart instead of a text-based answer.
“Instead of making up a bunch of numbers, which every other language model would do, we’ll just show you our stock app right there inside the conversation,” You.com founder Richard Socher told TechCrunch.
He added that this is a big leap forward for chat-based search, which puts his company ahead of his much larger competitors.
“It’s a big step forward to get large language models to be multimodal in the sense of the different modalities being text, but also code, but also tables, and also graphs and images and interactive elements — and sometimes that is the best way to answer your question. I truly believe that this better way to represent the answer to this question than any text could be,” he said.
You.com launched at the end of 2020, believing there is room for another search engine based more on AI. Also, the company wants to be anti-Google in the sense that it doesn’t want to mine users’ data to serve them ads, ads, and more ads.
“Google is a monolithic, monopolistic search engine that is closed and has ultimately weaponized AI against users for the sake of serving its true purpose: advertising. We are building You.com as a search platform that is open and emphasizes directly serving user needs with You.com apps instead of bombarding people with ads,” he said.
Socher didn’t share the details of the technology behind the multimodal search, concerned that his competitors could use it against him.
“We don’t really share right now how we built it. I know a lot of people are super curious about how we are building all this stuff. But a lot of people are trying to copy what we’re doing. And it just doesn’t really make sense until we’re at least default live or profitable as a startup to share all our technology, or even high level or details on how we’re doing any of it,” he said.
He said that the company is experiencing a double-digit percentage growth every month, with millions of people using the site daily. However, they are still considering how to monetize, but it won’t be like Google or Bing.
Among the options, they are considering are private ads, subscriptions to different add-ons, and more.
We like You.com’s intent NOT to follow us around and will suggest their service to everyone. So, if you want to try an alternative search engine – here’s an option worth trying out.