New Search Engine wants to beat google by taking on its biggest weakness -

You.com (YOU/Washington Post illustration)
By Heather Kelly
Today at 8:00 a.m. EST

There’s a new search engine in town, and it’s the latest in a long line of competitors hoping to shave off just a sliver of Google’s billion-dollar search business.

The website is called You — not to be confused with the pronoun or the Netflix show staring Penn Badgley. The company hopes a combination of summarizing other sites’ results, similar to Google, and a private browsing mode will be enough to lure in casual searchers. Instead of a list of links, You’s results are sorted into rows, with each having a carousel of options from sites such as Twitter, Reddit and BBC, or types like images and traditional search results. The eventual idea, says the company, is to use artificial intelligence to give a more customized results page that people don’t need to leave.

The search engine is launching as a public beta on Tuesday at You.com and is notable for the Silicon Valley money behind it. It’s backed by Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and has raised $20 million in funding.

A search for Foo Fighters on the You search engine. (You)
Like many smaller search services, You relies heavily on other engines such as Yelp’s catalogue of businesses, LinkedIn’s catalogue of people who’ve had jobs and Wikipedia’s catalogue of facts. While it does index some of its own content, You is also partnering with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, for some results. In the future, sites could customize their results boxes, says the company.

On You, the fully private “incognito” mode is opt-in and means it is not collecting data. If you search in regular mode, it does collect data to customize your results but has no targeted ads.

In fact, the company has no plans for making any money at this time, says co-founder and chief executive Richard Socher in an interview, which frees it up to not have any ads at all. For now the product is a webpage, You.com, and a browser extension, and it only does searches in English.