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You.coma new, customizable open search platform with the grand goal of challenging Google for worldwide search primacy, today announced the launch of YouCodea specialized search engine for developers that the company claims allows people to code more efficiently.
The two-year-old startup also announced a $25 million A-chain funding led by AI-focused Radical Ventures.
Unlike the Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines, You.com users can Implement AI for personalization and customization the sources they want to see, the order of the results and how private they want their results, co-founder and CEO Richard Socher told VentureBeat. “Google has dictated your search results over the years,” he said.
You.com has integrated apps into the platform that allow users to customize searches for the type of work or project they’re working on. For example, Socher said, they can explicitly use AI to perform an action in 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).
Socher, a former principal scientist at Salesforce, told VentureBeat: “Search is the power source of so much of our lives. “We make health, business and travel decisions based on search. There are so many that it’s hard to pinpoint a single one.
“When you search on You.com, you can make a decision about something and then it really helps you make that decision,” says Socher. “On Google, search and ads take you to subpages based on SEO (search engine optimization) results that direct traffic to Amazon 24-hour cookies or the like. That doesn’t help people.”
YouCode is built on top of You.com to improve coding efficiency, Socher said. It uses the platform’s extensibility to apply You.com’s internal search capabilities to more than 20 of the most commonly used developer tools, such as Stack Overflow, GitHib, PyTorch, Hugging Face, PyPi, AWS, MDN, JSON, 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 an encrypted query is never a blue link – it’s the code and the explanation. Without leaving the current window, developers can find code snippets with easy copy/paste buttons right next to them.
- Code with AI support: YouCode’s AI can generate code based on a search query with Code Complete, a touchable app large neural network to autocomplete any developer related queries.
- Skim documents faster: Quickly read documentation from AWS or developer-focused publications like “Towards Data Science” using previews that summarize what is most often useful from a source.
- Access academic guides and publications: Apps from W3 School are great for beginners, but more advanced developers can quickly move on to more complex tutorials. In addition to Github repos, they can explore great content from academic publications like Arxiv to learn the “why” behind the code from the authors themselves.
- Catch data errors faster: Validate any JSON file with the JSON Syntax Validator app right on the search results page.
- Find colors: It’s easy to find out the exact color by converting with color scale and transparency. Copy the HEX, RGB, and HSV values to their clipboard to help find and use their colors elsewhere.
- Speed through websites: Access over 13,000 keyboard shortcuts! Bang to access other sites’ search results right from your search bar.
San Francisco-based You.com plans to let outside developers and organizations build their own apps for the platform later this year as part of its mission to build experiences. open, collaborative search, Socher said.
“The goal is to give back control of the Internet to users and communities,” he said. “Developers will be able to create apps that run in 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 some of its popular apps so developers can work to improve search results for everyone, Socher said. Developers can get a waitlist for the You.com developer program by submitting a question 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 investors include 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 the default search engine. It also has a coding-specific VS Code extension that you can use while coding to search for pieces of code and keep the process going.
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