Free-to-use search engine
You.com is a free-to-use search engine from Bryan McCann and Richard Socher. This web browser platform promises to return control to the users by keeping the engine ad-free and customizable. It features a growing number of apps that return as search results, and some of them can be integrated into your search experience.
As an AI-driven platform, You.com works slightly differently from its contemporaries such as Microsoft’s Bing or the emerging Groot platform. It sorts the results based on categories, which makes it confusing for new users but ultimately convenient once you get the hang of it.
Reinventing internet searches
Like any other search engine, your You.com experience starts with a simple landing page that looks a lot like Google, but with a different URL and logo greeting you. Unlike Bing, though, it doesn’t offer additional content from the start, such as the latest news and weather updates. Instead, it has a brief material promoting the use of this platform showing its unique capabilities.
Sure enough, its minimalist homepage allows the search engine to load faster than its other competitors. It also offers links to other services on a bar on top of the page. You can check out its AI chatbot, YouChat; or a similarly-powered text generator for emails and writing prompts. Its strength, however, is in not collecting any user data, allowing you to enjoy browsing without any targeted material.
The main issue with this alternative, however, is in the way it presents search results. Instead of simply showing websites or answers based on customizable filters, it returns search results sorted into different categories. A part of the site sorts them by types, such as news, images, or videos. Another section sorts them based on the source site. All this makes the experience overwhelming, especially for new users.
For tech-savvy users
If you’re the kind of internet user who’s cautious about things like targeted ads, data collection, and privacy, You.com is a promising alternative. It lets you search for the content you need without storing your device information or search history, making it feel like an incognito search engine. It works for more savvy users, but not for casual ones. The way it organizes information can easily get overwhelming.
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