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you.coma new, customizable open search platform with the firm goal of challenging Google for global search superiority, today announced the launch of YouCodea specialized developer search engine that the company believes enables coders to work more efficiently.
The two-year-old startup also announced a $25 million inflow in Series A funding led by AI-focused Radical Ventures.
Unlike search engines Google, Bing, and Yahoo, You.com users can: Using AI to personalize and adapt sources they want to see, the order of the results and how private they want their results to be, co-founder and CEO Richard Socher told VentureBeat. “Google has been dictating the results of your searches all these years,” he said.
You.com has built apps into the platform that allow users to customize searches for the type of work or projects they do. For example, Socher said they can explicitly use AI to perform an action within the search results; these features include YouWrite (an AI-powered text generator for students and copywriters) and Code Complete (an AI-powered code generation tool for developers).
“Search determines a large part of our lives,” Socher, a former chief scientist at Salesforce, told VentureBeat. “We make medical, business and travel decisions based on searches. There are so many that it is difficult to locate just one.
“If you search You.com, you can make a decision about something, and then it helps you execute that decision,” says Socher. “On Google, search and ads send you to secondary sites based on SEO (search engine optimization) results that direct traffic to a 24-hour cookie on Amazon or something similar. You don’t help people with that.”
YouCode is built on the You.com platform to improve coding efficiency, Socher said. It leverages the extensibility of the platform to apply the internal You.com search to more than 20 of the most widely used developer tools, such as Stack Overflow, GitHib, PyTorch, Hugging Face, PyPi, AWS, MDN, JSON formatter , AI-powered code completion and more.
Key Features for Developers on YouCode
Other features on YouCode, according to Socher, include:
- Code snippets in the results: The correct answer to a coding question is never a blue link – it’s code and explanation. Without leaving the current window, developers can find code snippets with simple copy/paste buttons next to them.
- Code with AI assistance: YouCode’s AI can generate code from a query with Code Complete, an app that uses a large neural network to autocomplete any developer-related search.
- Browse documentation faster: Quickly read documentation from AWS or developer-focused publications like “Toward Data Science” using the preview panels that summarize what’s most useful from a resource.
- Access tutorials and academic publications: W3 Schools apps are great for beginners, but more advanced developers can quickly jump to more complex tutorials. In addition to Github repos, they can discover great content from academic publications like Arxiv to dig into the “why” behind the authors’ own code.
- Catch data errors faster: Validate any JSON file with the JSON Syntax Validator app on the search results page.
- Find colors: It’s easy to find the exact color by switching with the Hue and Transparency scales. Copy the HEX, RGB, and HSV values to their clipboard to find and use their color elsewhere.
- Fast through websites: Access 13,000+ !bang shortcuts to jump to other sites’ search results right from your search bar.
San Francisco-based You.com plans to allow third-party developers and organizations to build their own apps for the platform later this year as part of its mission to build an open, collaborative search experience, Socher said.
“The goal is to return control of the Internet to users and the community,” he said. “Developers can build apps that run on the search results pages, using state-of-the-art search technologies You.com has developed as part of its search platform.”
You.com will also make several of its popular apps open source so developers can work on improving search results for everyone, Socher said. Developers can get on a waiting list for the You.com developer program by submitting an application here†
The new funding brings You.com’s total capital raised to $45 million since its inception in late 2020. In addition to Radical Ventures, there were recurring seed round investors including Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, Breyer Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Day One Ventures.
You.com is available on both Android and iOS and offers a Chrome extension to change a default search engine. It also features a coding-specific VS Code extension that you can use while coding to search for code snippets and stay in the flow.
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