“[…]It isn’t a spaceship; it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards, and takes us to a place where we ache to go[…]” — Don Draper, “Mad Men”
On Christmas Eve 2022, You.com took a monumental leap forward by pioneering the integration of a large language model into a search engine, giving birth to YouChat. This innovation quickly earned YouChat the title of the first conversational search engine, transforming the way users interact with information online.
Yet, this was merely the beginning. In the past six months, YouChat has served millions of users, gathering invaluable feedback that has guided our relentless pursuit of excellence and refinement of YouChat’s fluidity, utility, and accuracy. Read on to discover the astonishing new advancements we’ve built into YouChat 3.0.
Interested in learning how it all started? Read What is YouChat.
Becoming A Chat-First Search Engine
YouChat is now the default experience on You.com, presenting search results in an engaging, conversational way from the start of your search journey. You have the freedom to customize your search experience by effortlessly switching between various tabs such as Images, All, and Social. With our Chrome extension, you can select which view you want to see first: YouChat or traditional search.
Convenient Fact-Checking
We have added citation previews to chat messages to highlight the source of provided information. This enables you to evaluate the credibility of AI-generated responses quickly, reducing the potential for misinformation and streamlining the fact-checking process.
More Apps for More Utility
Chat apps are another innovation we brought to conversational search. Apps enrich chat outputs with visuals and offer users an interactive and summarized view of large data sets using multimodal elements, such as charts, images, videos, and interactive graphs. For example, if you ask, “What’s the weather?” graphics in our weather app make the output much more useful, displaying the weather forecast for the entire week.
We’ve optimized our ranking models to display only relevant and useful apps based on your search intent, improving the accuracy of search results without any added effort from you. Simply click on an app name to see more. In addition, we’ve enhanced the design of several of our existing chat apps. What to Watch, Wikipedia, and Stack Overflow are now smaller and without redundant information.
We will gradually add more of our 150+ useful apps.
New apps include:
- Images
- Places
- Weather
- Yelp
Suggested Searches
Understanding prompts is essential for excelling in conversational search. To ensure users can fully harness the potential of conversational search without prior knowledge of prompts, we’ve incorporated suggested searches to kick-start their journey. Experience the power of conversational search seamlessly with YouChat as your intuitive guide.
Always On — Significant Uptime Improvements
Millions of users searching simultaneously used to cause intermittent disruptions in the search experience that were cited as one of users’ greatest frustrations. By implementing new, robust backup systems, we now ensure that YouChat is consistently available, regardless of the level of demand. Our commitment to reliability means you can trust YouChat to be there whenever you need it.
One Query Bar
Thanks to your valuable feedback, we’ve unified the Query Bar across our tabs with YouChat 3.0. By eliminating multiple search entry points, the Query Bar increases efficiency and ease of use:
- Start a conversation about anything
- Ask YouChat follow-up questions
- See images, social media discussions, videos, or code with one click
- Get results for your query across tabs without retyping anything
- Find the most relevant and accurate web results
Conversational Fluidity
We’ve enhanced the fluidity of YouChat conversations, ensuring a seamless and reliable experience within a single chat thread. Although large language models can sometimes falter when faced with a rapid succession of questions, we have implemented significant improvements in our machine learning models to ensure faster, more nuanced responses and accurate source citations. With YouChat, you can effortlessly ask follow-up questions when delving into complex topics, switch subjects mid-chat, or even create an entire children’s book in a single thread. You can trust YouChat to handle your queries with ease and precision.
Save and Share Chats
Another long-requested feature was the ability to manage past chats. Whether you’re saving a personal conversation, collaborating on a work-related task, or looking to share newfound knowledge, our intuitive interface lets you manage and access your chats effortlessly. All features, including access to chat history, updating thread titles, and sharing a link to the current chat thread, are available in the left rail.
The Best of the Web
We hold fast to our values of trust and accuracy and incorporate them into every aspect of our product and organization. Easy access to web links and citations will always be fundamental building blocks of the search engine. They help us to verify the information, learn, and find what we are looking for. Easily find what you’re seeking with web results conveniently displayed in the right rail.
Focus Mode lets you hide web results and remembers your preference for next time.
Ready to start chatting? Check out the upgraded experience on You.com. We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback!
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