Highlights

  • The new app You.com by SuSea Inc. is an excellent alternative search engine platform. It will drive valuable search results for developers looking out for applications.

SuSea Inc., a startup with a capital sum of over USD 45 million in venture capital funding, announced the launch of a new alternative search engine platform. It is targeted at third-party developers to create a compelling rival to Google search.

SuSea is the creator of You.com, which is an alternative search engine that functions on the thought process that the search experience can be made much better with the integration of applications that appear on any results as static widgets or information panels. For example, if someone searches for places to eat, they might see a carousel of restaurants nearby from Yelp.

The investors of You.com include Salesforce Inc. Chief Executive Marc Benioff. He says that it has already helped in building over 200 apps by itself. Now, it says third-party developers may also use the platform to build their own search-based apps.

You.com currently displays a selection of apps at the bottom of each search result page. With the apps, one can browse through additional sources that might be better suited for a specific query. For example, a keyword search of “Call of Duty” may bring up apps like YouTube and Twitch, which can then be searched for the latest “Call of Duty” streams and likewise. The ones who are searching for news can choose to add sources such as New York Times and Associated Press.

Richard Socher, a former Salesforce executive, present CEO and founder of You.com said that the platform’s algorithms would learn from user behavior to understand which kinds of apps people want to see. Apps that provide greater value will be ranked higher in its search results, which will be like a reward for developers that make more useful search apps, he said.

Socher explained, “We’re definitely going to rank higher apps that are providing value to users. If you just create a massive banner ad for your site, everyone’s going to downvote the app, and you’re going to disappear from the app store.”

Till now, more than 500 developers have applied to build search apps for You.com. From these, 15 already had their apps integrated with the site, including the price comparison and shopping site Price.com and the podcast search engine ListenNotes. Socher illustrates that apart from these, there are 150 apps currently undergoing development.

Developers are being moved with the benefit of the revenue-sharing model when users buy a product from an app’s search results. It has plans to add in-search subscription services too. It is already generating good revenue through a subscription-based artificial intelligence writing tool.

You.com is thinking apart from the regular trends. It plans to follow traditional advertising as an additional source of revenue, unlike Google ads, which are based on users’ histories. You.com ads will be based on search keywords only.