You.com, a new, customizable open search platform with the hefty goal of challenging Google for worldwide search superiority, today announced the launch of YouCode, a specialized search engine for developers that the company claims enables coders to be more efficient.
The two-year-old startup also announced an influx of $25 million in series A funding led by AI-focused Radical Ventures.
Unlike search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo, You.com users can deploy AI to personalize and customize sources they want to see, the order of the results, and how private they want their results to be, cofounder and CEO Richard Socher told VentureBeat. "Google has been dictating the results of your searches for all these years," he said.
You.com has built apps into the platform that enable users to customize searches for the type of work or projects they're doing. 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 is powering so much of our lives," Socher, a former chief scientist at Salesforce, told VentureBeat. "We make medical, business and travel decisions based on search. There's so much that it's hard to pinpoint a single one.
"When you search on You.com, you can make a decision on something, and then it actually helps you execute that decision," Socher said. "On Google, search and ads send you to secondary sites based on SEO (search engine optimization) results that just funnel traffic to a 24-hour cookie on Amazon or something like that. That's not helping people."
YouCode is built on the You.com platform to improve coding efficiency, Socher said. It uses the extensibility of the platform to apply the in-house You.com search capability to more than 20 of the most commonly used developer tools, such as Stack Overflow, GitHib, PyTorch, Hugging Face, PyPi, AWS, MDN, JSON formatter, AI-powered code completion & more.
Key features for developers on YouCode
Other features on YouCode, according to Socher, include:
San Francisco-based You.com plans to allow external 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 give back control of the internet to users and the community," he said. "Developers will be able to build apps that run within the search results pages, using state-of-the-art search technologies that You.com has developed as part of its search platform."
You.com will also open-source several of its popular apps 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 inquiry 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, returning seed round investors included 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.