You.com founder Richard Socher knows his company has always been David chasing Goliath with search, Google and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft. He likes to point out that his company built a generative AI-based search in December. This comes months before other giant search players announced.
Today the company is off to a head start, announcing that it is building multimodal search. This means that you can add non-textual elements to answer questions more precisely. For example, if you ask a question like “Which company has the most CRM market share?”, the answer is “Salesforce”, follow up with “What is the stock price of Salesforce?”, and see a stock chart instead. will be text-based answer.
Socher says it’s a big step forward for chat-based search and gives his company an edge over its much larger competitors. “Instead of making lots of numbers like all other language models do, we show the stock app in conversation,” Socher told TechCrunch.
He believes that is a more effective way of answering that kind of question, and that these different modalities can be applied to other questions depending on the context. Doing is a big step forward in the sense that it’s not just text, it’s not just code, it’s different modalities: tables, graphs, images, interactive elements, etc. Sometimes this is the best answer to your question. I truly believe that this way of expressing the answer to this question is better than any text,” he said.
You.com displays charts and other elements when they help answer questions more than text. Image credit: u.com
You.com launched at the end of 2020 with the belief that there is room for another AI-powered search engine. It’s a concept the search market has caught up to, but Socher believes there’s room for new approaches that incumbents can’t offer.
As he told TechCrunch during its $25 million funding round last summer, he wants You.com to be anti-Google:
“Google is a monolithic, proprietary search engine, closed, and ultimately weaponizing AI against its users to serve its true purpose of advertising. We open You.com We’re building it as a powerful search platform, focused on addressing users’ needs directly in the You.com app rather than bombarding people with ads,” he told TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggers at the time.
Socher is reluctant to discuss the technology behind his company’s search right now, out of concern that competitors might use his search solution. It says it will reveal the secret sauce it uses to build its search solution.
“We are not sharing how we built it right now. But a lot of people are trying to imitate what we’re doing and defaulting to live or profitability at least as a startup for us to share all the technology It doesn’t really make sense until, or until we share a high level or detail on how we’re doing it,” he said.
He said the company is growing at double-digit monthly growth rates, with millions of people using the site every day. They’re still figuring out how to monetize, but it won’t be like Google or Bing.
“You don’t have to make $500 million a day. There’s no pressure as a startup right now. But this year, we’re thinking about monetization and exploring different avenues,” he said. This includes private ads, subscriptions to various add-ons that help users write essays and blog posts for a few dollars a week. You can also open the platform to build third-party apps, such as stock apps that display stock charts.
“We can only allow that third-party app to sell a service. If it is relevant to the user and the user wants to buy what that company sells, we will take a portion of it. So it’s like monetizing the end of the funnel, not the beginning of the funnel, and that’s what advertising does,” he said.
He certainly understands that he’s trying to stand up to some tough competition, but he believes You.com has found a way to differentiate itself from its competitors.
“It’s certainly a tough field to compete in, and you have to build something unique and different, but at the same time, build enough to capture most of what people are looking for in a search engine today. There is,’ he said. He said.
“And that’s what we’ve been doing, and that’s part of why we’re growing now and can provide a fresh new perspective on what search engines can or should help. .”
