Is You.com ahead of Google and Bing? For several months, the You.com search engine has been offering intelligent research based on artificial intelligence. In December, the company integrated its own chatbot into the heart of its platform. On February 7, the company announced the arrival of multimodal research in its results.
Multiple response formats
In the race for intelligent search results based on AI, You.com seems to be a pioneer today. As ChatGPT begins to be integrated into Bing, and alongside the development of Bard, You.com offers smart results directly in its search pages. Images, videos, widgets, tables, graphs, codes… will appear in the results after a simple question from the Internet user.
Multimodal research is “the best way to answer” users’ questions, says Richard Socher at TechCrunch. And to add:I sincerely believe that this way of representing the answer to a question is better than any text.”
After a query about a stock index, You.com is notably capable, as Google already is, of displaying a stock chart. Even more interestingly, the AI can understand a precise technical question and generate a simple, personalized and didactic answer.
A still secret AI model
On the technical side, the artificial intelligence behind You is based on CAL, an in-house linguistic model. However, the small company does not wish to detail the purely technological aspects behind its system, fearing to be copied by the American giants. “I know a lot of people are very curious about how we build all of this. But a lot of people try to copy what we do. And that doesn’t really make sense until we’re (…) profitable as a startup“, explains the founder.
For the time being, the executives of the young shoot are still thinking about a financial model to make their service profitable. Growing, You.com would already be used by “millions of people” every day. Even if the competition will become increasingly tough in the coming months, Richard Socher wants to believe that the user experience based on simplicity can make the difference.
“Sure, the competition is tough and you need to build something that is both unique and different, but at the same time good enough to capture most of the features that people currently expect from their search engine.“, assures the manager.