You.com is taking on Google with AI, apps, privacy, and personalization

Ești mulțumit de căutarea pe Google? Indiferent de modul în care răspunzi la această întrebare, sunt șanse să o folosești în continuare. Cu excepțiile notabile din China și Rusia, unde Baidu și Yandex conduc, respectiv, Google's market share in search is over 90% worldwide.

It's not that Google is the only game in town. Besides Baidu and Yandex, the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo have tried their luck too, with Bing and the eponymous search engine, respectively. The privacy-focused DuckDuckGo is another option. Yet, none of those has a market share of over 3% worldwide. Can a new entry do better than so many others before it?

Richard Socher așa crede. Socher, fondatorul și CEO al motorului de căutare parvenit tu.com, a avut această misiune imposibilă în minte încă de pe vremea lui Stanford. Astăzi, aproape un deceniu mai târziu, cu o mulțime de distincții și o mulțime de experiență în startup și întreprindere sub centură, Socher este cu capul în jos într-o misiune imposibilă.

Nașterea ta.com

Când Socher a venit în SUA din Europa, la vârsta de douăzeci de ani, visul său a fost să obțină un loc de muncă la facultate și a muncit din greu pentru a deveni realitate. A intrat în învățarea profundă devreme, când era doar un subiect de nișă, și a lucrat cu pionierii învățării profunde Andrew Ng și Chris Manning la Stanford.

După ce a câștigat premiul pentru cea mai bună teză de informatică pentru doctoratul său. privind Învățarea profundă recursive pentru procesarea limbajului natural (NLP) și Viziunea pe computer, Socher s-a gândit că înființarea unui startup ar fi doar un ocol în drumul către mediul academic. Viața i-a dovedit că se înșeală.

Socher a descris primul său startup, MetaMind, ca „o platformă AI de întreprindere care a funcționat în imagistica medicală și imagini de comerț electronic și NLP și o mulțime de alte lucruri, o platformă orizontală joacă ca instrument de învățare automată pentru dezvoltatori”. Dacă asta sună interesant astăzi, probabil că a fost înaintea timpului său în 2014.

Salesforce acquired MetaMind in 2016, and Socher became the Chief Data Scientist at Salesforce. He led more than 100 researchers and many hundreds of engineers, working on applications that were deployed at Salesforce scale and impact. Socher was instrumental in creating Salesforce Einstein, a wide-ranging initiative to inject AI capabilities into Salesforce's platform.

În 2020, Socher a părăsit Salesforce pentru a-și urmări ambiția de lungă durată de a construi un motor de căutare, pe care l-a numit you.com. You.com a strâns aproximativ 20 de milioane de dolari de la un număr de investitori, inclusiv de la co-fondatorul, președintele și co-CEO al Salesforce Mark Benioff. Prima versiune a fost implementată de Socher la sfârșitul doctoratului. dar inițial a ezitat să urmărească acest lucru.

“At the time, I thought, man, it's just too ambitious. People were probably like, Google's going to sue me. All my smart friends are going to work at Google. It's going to be so hard to compete with them. No one's really complaining about Google very much in my circles and online. And so I kind of discarded the idea,” Socher said.

Socher claimed that he's not into this for a quick acquisition, and added that he and the small team at you.com are very motivated, and have the runway to work on this for many years. Socher acknowledged that this will in fact take many years, and gave three different groups of reasons for taking on Google: User-specific, macro, and timing.

What's wrong with Google?

Multe dintre motivele specifice ale utilizatorului pe care Socher le-a invocat au de-a face cu confidențialitatea. Majoritatea călătoriilor online încep cu o căutare simplă, iar faptul că confidențialitatea noastră este invadată atât de masiv la aproape fiecare pas pe care îl facem online, pe măsură ce viața noastră merge din ce în ce mai mult online este regretabil, a spus el. Cu toate acestea, a adăugat el, utilizatorii devin conștienți de asta, and that's a good thing.

Ads are also part of Socher's user-specific reasons. As a user, it's just annoying to see five, seven different ads before you see some content, Socher said. Plus, once you learn a bit about how content ranking works, you realize all these search engine optimized (SEO) microsites are also just ads trying to funnel Google into affiliate links and cookies, he added.

Then, there is the issue of control. “A lot of people think about their food diet, but I think our information diet is incredibly important, too. It's important to be able to [..] say, I want to see more Reddit or less Reddit, or I want to see New York Times or ZDNet and others, versus just being sold with your information desires to the highest-bidding advertiser and having no control over it,” Socher said.

Socher's macro reasons mostly come down to the fact that “the entire economy is moving online, and having a single gatekeeper that wants to sell you to the highest advertiser is not an ideal setup for the web, period,” as he put it. 

Google a făcut-o întotdeauna a susținut că Google Ads și clasamentul organic sunt complet independente. Socher questioned the validity of this claim, although we were not able to verify this independently. Socher commented that “it's like a bad movie, and it's kind of nuts that it's happening.” On the bright side, he added, now there is some tailwind in terms of antitrust and realizing the issues at stake for the entire economy”.  

Undeva între macro și sincronizare ar fi ceea ce am putea numi potop informațional. În urmă cu douăzeci de ani, era uimitor să poți avea acces la informații. Astăzi, accesarea informațiilor este o miză de masă, iar problema este cum să faci față tuturor, a remarcat Socher. Răspunsul lui: „Trebuie să ai AI care să o rezumă pentru tine".

Socher strongly believes that now is the time to innovate in search, as there hasn't really been that much innovation in recent years. Initially, Google provided an insane amount of value, but now it's logarithmically flattened off, Socher said. The data that people provide to Google was not very valuable initially, but now we're reaching an inflection point where people's data becomes more valuable than the services they get from Google, he added.

It could be argued that over time Google has added AI to power its search as well, notably by using BERT, one of the Large Language Models (LLMs) pioneered by Google. However, Socher did not hold back on his critique, noting that the only way to get “something real” out of Google search is to instruct it to get results from sites like Reddit explicitly every time and that Google's idea of innovation seems to come down to adding an ever-growing list of ads to its results to increase sales.

Taking on Google with AI, apps, privacy, and personalization

There is a certain grounding in Socher's critique of Google. However, it's a well-known fact to anyone even remotely familiar with search engines that Google a construit un șanț foarte eficient în jurul afacerii sale prin crearea a ceea ce este, probabil, cel mai cuprinzător și eficient index de pe web.

Plus, by now Google is so entrenched in the routine of billions of people around the world, and the default for most browser search options, that to make users switch, as one Yandex executive once told ZDNet, you have to be 10X better. Is that even possible for anyone, let alone an upstart like you.com? How do you go about that?

Socher's reply to this obvious question was based on the fact that not all queries are the same. Sometimes, he said, people just want to get factual information, such as the weather today, or the leader of an organization. Sometimes, they want to get to a specific site, and instead of typing it, they enter it in a search.

Pentru acele tipuri de interogări (interogări rapide de informații și, respectiv, interogări de navigare) tot ce puteți face este să le serviți cât mai repede posibil. Nu există loc de diferențiere. Acolo unde lucrurile devin interesante este în ceea ce Socher a numit „căutări complexe informaționale / de acțiune” sau interogări elaborate și, respectiv, interogări care sunt într-adevăr despre îndeplinirea unei sarcini.

Socher claimed that you.com already does better than Google in complex informational searches because it provides much more rich information. As for action searches, such as ordering takeaway or booking a flight, Socher made it clear that this is the goal for you.com. He referred to you.com apps, which are domain-specific modules that are fine-tuned to the needs of specific tasks/audiences.

One domain that you.com is targeting is coding and developer searches. Socher offered the example of a developer looking for how to train a model using PyTorch. You.com can help in a number of ways. There is a Stack Overflow app, there are code snippets, there is access to documentation, Reddit discussions, and even a code-generating app, Socher said.

These are all things that Google does not offer, they come with a copy-paste button, and they provide great value by helping developers save anywhere between 30 seconds and 30 minutes for each search, Socher claimed. There's “a ton of AI and NLP in there,” he added.

The same goes for things such as product reviews, which aggregate and summarize information from different sources, rather than having to open a multitude of tabs. That is 10X better, according to Socher. He also referred to how you.com works with content providers such as Stack Overflow for its apps, alluding to announcements with more details on “building an ecosystem” coming soon.

Socher also talked about you.com's business model and its stance on privacy. He is confident that you.com apps will provide value that enough people will be willing to pay for. Another feature that Socher believes adds value is personalization — the ability for users to customize results according to their preferences.

Clearly, in order for this to happen, user profiles must be supported. That opens the door to discussions around data collection, privacy, advertisement revenue, and related policies. At this point, Socher sees advertisements as secondary revenue streams and takes a middle-ground approach to privacy. You.com offers a private mode, and Socher promises better privacy: “We'll never be as bad as Google. We'll never sell your data”.

However, he also believes that if you make privacy your focal point, then “the hardcore privacy people at that point want you to be a fully encrypted, fully open source, no revenue, no data, nothing kind of project. Essentially, you can't really be a company, [..] you will never be able to compete with Google.” You.com will use data from logged-in users to serve localized results, which Socher believes is something most users want.

Ultimately, however, the choice between privacy and convenience will be up to the users. As for where the information is coming from: some of it, for generic queries, comes from Bing's index. For domain-specific queries, you.com has its own indices. This is a dependency all search engines except Google and Bing have, Socher said, although some like DuckDuckGo are “just a thin wrapper around Bing”.

Calea de urmat

It's still early days for you.com, so the verdict on whether this can work is still out. Besides “lots of love on Twitter and other channels,” which Socher referred to as an encouraging sign, there are more solid reasons for optimism too.

Socher does have a well-rounded analysis of Google's weaknesses, and the background, motivation, and backing to at least give this a shot. The approach you.com is taking, although not fully operational or unveiled yet, seems promising. You.com was recently included in CB Insights' AI 100 list of the most promising artificial intelligence startups of 2022.

You.com's founder does not seem to have any illusions about the fact that this is going to be an uphill battle. Getting users to adopt a pay-to-use model for search, beating Google at its own game of powering search with AI, and parcurge linia fină dintre menținerea fericirii utilizatorilor și gestionarea unei afaceri viabile toate sunt pariuri mari pentru you.com. Dacă nu altceva, totuși, o oarecare concurență pe piața de căutare stagnantă ar fi probabil bună pentru toată lumea.

What Socher identified as a key premise for you.com is the idea of making AI controllable by the people affected by it. For you.com, that translates to users being able to nudge the search engine as to what they'd like to see more or less of. As for the bigger picture in AI, Socher seems to have been spot on in his Discuție TED 2017 in which he identified NLP and multi-modal AI as key directions for the future.

Socher crede că LLM-urile „fac deja lucruri uimitoare” și speră că se vor face mai multe progrese în ceea ce privește învățarea multitask, permițându-le să fie mai buni la mai multe sarcini. Cu toate acestea, el consideră, de asemenea, că, în cele din urmă, LLM-urile vor trebui să fie injectate cu anumite reguli sau să le permită să le învețe, deoarece extinderea nu pare să poată realiza acest lucru.

In terms of moving AI forward, Socher also noted that current hardware favors a specific type of AI model architecture, which relies on matrix multiplications. That may or may not be the way forward, but this “hardware bias” has sidelined alternative model architectures. It's a bit like looking for your keys under the lamppost, Socher noted.

Socher is naturally aware of all major AI talking points these days, including bias (it's not just the datasets), sustainability (perhaps overblown, but we can and should do better), ethics (no easy answers, it depends on each person's stances and beliefs), and more. It's a conversație care merită explorată — poate chiar mai mult dacă you.com ajunge să funcționeze.