You.com founder Richard Socher’s plan to win the AI search wars

In 2020, Richard Socher left Salesforce to build the next big search engine. Google was king back then, but he felt its flagship product was woefully inefficient. Search queries were filled with SEO sludge and invasive advertisements, and the answers it provided were often too simplistic for the average knowledge worker. Using AI, Socher made sure the highest-quality information shone through in his product, You.com. 

“As a human, you would as a human need to use Google 10 times, ingest all that knowledge, write reports for it, cross-reference those reports with your company internal data, and then get a work product out,” Socher says. “That is what You.com does. Google just does not do that.” 

By now, there are scores of AI search products crowding the market, many of which look quite similar to Socher’s original vision. OpenAI premiered SearchGPT in October, while Perplexity scrapes the web for responses to its “answer engine.” Search stalwarts Google and Bing have AI summaries and chatbots.

You.com has kept a narrow focus on knowledge workers. Socher’s bet is that, while the likes of Google and OpenAI try to build wider audiences for their models, his specialized search product will remain valuable for those businesses aiming for clarity and factuality. The bet has paid off: You.com now counts among their customers companies like cybersecurity firm Mimecast and the Institute of Advanced Study, former home of Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Since inception, they’ve processed over one billion queries.

“If you want to jump on some hype wagon and play around with some tools, there’s a lot of folks that spend five, ten million plus a month on marketing,” Socher says. “For folks whose careers depend on accurate answers, then they usually come to You.com.”  

That sets a high bar for You.com, setting itself apart as the consistently accurate, hallucination-free AI search engine. Even OpenAI admitted in 2023 that their product was prone to “producing falsehoods” and had a tendency to “invent facts in moments of uncertainty.” Socher explains that You.com’s answers are not only derived from the large language model, but also from a company’s internal data, from the internet, and from the AI’s working memory.

“Many companies that started around ChatGPT said, ‘Oh, it’s all in the LLM,’” Socher says. “But really, the LLM is this summarization reasoning layer, and you need to have a search engine that feeds it information. We have actually built an accurate search engine, too, and that’s half the battle.” 

Citations are a point of contention for these AI search products, which can spit out web information without sending the lucrative traffic back to the corresponding publisher. The issue has opened up a turf war between Perplexity and major media companies, with Dow Jones and the New York Post even filing suit against the company. But for Socher, good quality citations are a point of pride. 

“Our competition, half of their cases, their citations are just random numbered links sprinkled behind LLM-generated sentences, and they don’t have anything to do with one another,” Socher says. “That doesn’t inspire confidence.”

Socher has some regrets. He wishes he’d invested more in marketing, as Google pumps out high-cost ads to promote Gemini. And he wishes he’d raised more in his early rounds, with their recent $50 million Series B pailing in comparison to Perplexity’s reported $500 million aims (not to mention OpenAI’s recent $6.6 billion haul). 

But You.com’s controlled growth, and their relentless focus on audience, has protected them from growing AI bloat. In an increasingly purposeless AI market, You.com knows exactly who they’re for.

This story is part of AI 20, our monthlong series of profiles spotlighting the most interesting technologists, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and creative thinkers shaping the world of artificial intelligence.

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