You.com, a search engine worth checking out

Over the last few months I’ve been testing You.com, a search engine created by Richard Socher, who I’ve been following since his previous company, deep-learning platform MetaMind, was acquired by Salesforce in 2016.

Socher is a German software engineer who in 2014 won the best doctoral thesis award at Stanford, dedicated to the application of deep learning to natural language processing and computer vision, which have been put to good use in the design of its search engine. In addition, he has taught at Stanford for several years, has an interesting list of academic publications and a TEDx Talk.

After the MetaMind acquisition, Socher joined Salesforce, where he remained Chief Scientist until July 2020, when he founded the company with which he is developing You.com. The idea is to create a search engine that gives users control over their privacy, their choice of sources and their time. I had been using it for some time as an easy way to access text (YouWrite) or image (Stable Diffusion) creation engines that I use in class, but also to do some occasional searches and with the app installed on my smartphone, and the truth is that I find the results interesting.

In practice, You.com makes sense when you sign up or install the app, at which point you can start choosing the features you are interested in. Since the search…