12 ms·
I found your pitch really interesting, I'd love to try it. I, however, refuse to install an extension and change my default search engine just to be allowed to
by ulber 5y ago
I found your pitch really interesting, I'd love to try it. I, however, refuse to install an extension and change my default search engine just to be allowed to type in a search query.
I'm sure you have some "growth hacking" reason for this that is compelling to you. Maybe you hope that the slight annoyance of switching back will outweigh the inevitable annoyances with a new product like this.
It does come off as user hostile though - you're trying to badger me to switch rather than selling me on the merits of you.com.
- vonnik 5y agoI've had access to You.com and I can attest that the initial experience is good. The search results are on point, the layout of those results is flexible and fresh. In contrast, when I use an engine like Google, the ads often cover the first five slots, or the totality of my phone's screen...
- muhammadusman 5y agoI closed the tab when I clicked the search bar and it took me to the chrome web store ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- llaolleh 5y agoDamn I thought me getting redirected to an extension was a bug. This is super lame.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- primitivesuave 5y agoI strongly second this. I immediately gave up on trying it out once I realized I had to download something. Your KPIs should be around how sticky your search features are, it seems like it is currently based on download counts.
- cududa 5y agoIf they published the extension source that might be more reasonable. I assume the extension is so a lot of heavy lifting on hitting individual apps/ API's happens locally to alleviate costs or rate limiting
- richardsocher 5y agoWorking on it right now :) Extension changes your navbar setting. It's 33kB. All the heavy lifting happens on our servers so as to not slow browsers down for users.
- mh- 5y agoFYI, 17kB of that is a PNG icon that will never be rendered above 128x128. edit: actually, you have properly sized favicons additionally. Not sure what the 17kB one is for.
- rameshvel 5y agoIf its just 33 kb, whatever it does can be done in the webpage itself. To try the search engine, I have to install an extension or make it as a default search engine. Not cool at all.
- cududa 5y agosorry you got downvoted so much! But would be great to know the purpose of the extension, and why the service can't work without it
- richardsocher 5y agoHey. Thanks. We got lots of love in other places like Twitter, LinkedIn, ProductHunt, Facebook and others. So that made the launch an overall big success :) The only purpose of the extension is to make it convenient and easy to change your default on Chrome. Convenience usually wins on the internet. The extension has permissions to write to one field. No read access. Chrome flags and lets you verify permissions when you install an extension. Sadly, most users on the internet would not go into their settings to make a change. Of course, here on HN there are a lot of experts who care about their privacy and can make that change manually. We've listened and it's not required anymore to try it out. Being fully open is ultimately more aligned with our values of trust, facts and kindness.
- richardsocher 5y agoHey. Yea. We struggle with the extension -> navbar search requirement also. We have found that if you're not the default engine that is easily accessible from the Navbar, you will not be able to break the Google monopoly. We also found that many people will just do a quick search for "asd" or "weather" and then leave because those searches aren't really differentiated (and just can't really be). Our extension is 33kB and has no other features. It's easy to see the source so you can see that it does nothing interesting or sketchy. It changes the setting. You can change that setting manually and get the same effect and usage after. But most users don't know how to change a setting and you got some large 2tr$ monopoly that doesn't want you to change...
- pedalpete 5y agoI agree with your sentiment about being the default engine to break people free of google, but do you have evidence that the browser extension is the way to get people to do that? On the other side, you have a search bar on the page, so I'm not exactly sure what people are complaining about.
- dwohnitmok 5y agoIf you open it up in Chrome, then first off the main search bar in the middle of the screen turns into a button to install the extension. There remains a search bar in the upper left hand corner of the screen, but if you actually search, no search results are given. Instead the result page is replaced by a link to install the Chrome extension. So effectively, as far as I can tell, on a normal Chrome browsing session there is no way to actually use the search functionality without installing the extension. This does not seem to happen on other browsers or in incognito mode.
- richardsocher 5y agoAnd now it also doesn't happen in Chrome anymore. We dropped the requirement there too.
- 5y ago
- somenewaccount1 5y agoyeah, i installed the extension and it immediately mucked with my chrome profiles. thanks, but no thanks. glad i'm not the only one that felt this way.
- richardsocher 5y agothat's a chrome setting. our extension has zero influence on your chrome profiles. we'll open source it soon so you can verify :)
- somenewaccount1 5y agoHrm, I think it's your team being ignorant of a bug. Other extensions do not move around my profiles at all upon install and usage, only this app. Wasn't just a security thing, but a huge inconvenience I don't want to happen again, so I just uninstalled. As you can read, I'm not the only user that feels this way/has this experience. EDIT: I see now that ya'll changed it so the extension is no longer needed. Nice work. The app is pretty cool! It might already be a feature I haven't found yet - but I wish I could filter (or sort) by date. I look up a lot of stocks and articles that are > 3 months old (and sometimes even >1 mos old) are not of value.
- jamestanderson 5y agoI might install an extension. I have the DuckDuckGo Privacy extension for instance, and use DDG as my primary search engine. But I use Firefox, and it doesn't seem like this company provides a Firefox addon. It's an interesting choice to launch a search engine, give reasons for using it instead of Google, but also play into the Google quasi-monopoly by not providing a Firefox addon. Hopefully it's coming soon.
- richardsocher 5y agoYea, we'll definitely support more platforms, including mobile soon. It's on the roadmap :)
- richardsocher 5y agoPS: You can easily change your settings in Firefox manually also: https://youdotcom.notion.site/Make-You-com-your-default-search-f87c10bbfe7e4e34ae89aeba7e77f474 https://youdotcom.notion.site/Make-You-com-your-default-sear...
- richardsocher 5y agoYea... Requiring the extension for navbar searches was a tough choice. You actually can try it out in incognito mode and any other browser. But we found that without the convenience of a navbar search, most people won't give it a proper try either way. I hope we can drop this requirement even in Chrome when we become one of the default options. We will implement an a/b test and see if we can get rid of the requirement even earlier. If you set your search engine default to https://you.com https://you.com manually in Chrome with "https://you.com/search?q=%s https://you.com/search?q=%s" you will not need the extension... but for most people convenience wins and well... It's tough to go up against a monopoly that controls the browser too? You can find more details for every browser setup here: https://youdotcom.notion.site/Make-You-com-your-default-search-f87c10bbfe7e4e34ae89aeba7e77f474 https://youdotcom.notion.site/Make-You-com-your-default-sear...
- smoldesu 5y agoIs there a way for me to use it without omnibar integration? I'd really prefer to leave my search engine as-is...
- richardsocher 5y agoyes, you can just go into incognito mode. we care a lot about privacy so we didn't want to mess with that. it should just work when you're in incognito mode. if you then also go into private mode - you'll have the MOST privacy preserving search experience that we know of, certainly even better than DDG: Here's our blog post about how we think about the privacy-convenience tradeoff: https://youdotcom.notion.site/Privacy-and-Data-Protection-at-you-com-a45fe125e329439e8a45b2807845c8ce https://youdotcom.notion.site/Privacy-and-Data-Protection-at...
- smoldesu 5y agoThat's indeed unfortunate, I hope you reconsider.
- richardsocher 5y ago
- eikenberry 5y agoI'm confused. If you go to you.com there is a search field right there just like every other search site. No extension is needed to try it. Why do you say you aren't allowed to search without the extension?
- icelancer 5y agoTry it in Chrome. It blocks you after you try to search.
- eikenberry 5y agoThanks, that explains it as I use Firefox. That is surely a very odd decision to have it fail to with Chrome/Chromium without a plugin. I can see why it'd make people a bit suspicious as there is no reason for it other than to force the use of a plugin when it isn't necessary.
- dhosek 5y agoI avoid Chrome whenever possible. It's a battery and privacy killer. Search field worked fine in Safari.
- icelancer 5y agoWell, that's fine, but all the issues being reported here are due to Chrome users seeing the same thing - inability to use You.com unless you install an even larger potential privacy killer in the form of an extension. Otherwise it refuses to let you search using the on page bar.
- richardsocher 5y agoNot all extensions are the same. I understand healthy skepticism since there are a ton of sketchy extensions out there. We will open source it in the next few hours since 80% of comments here are just about this extension :D It's 33kB and a dead simple change in one setting.
- codegeek 5y agoYea it is weird. It claims privacy and then wants you to install an extension just to do a search ? No thanks.
- richardsocher 5y agoAn extension that only has write access to one field won't hurt privacy, but we dropped the extension requirement entirely :)
- didntknowya 5y agoyea i'm not going to install an extension. but actually you CAN try it with the little text box at the top. took me a second look to find it. the spammy design doesn't actually make it obvious. kinda like yahoo's clutter vs google's minimalist homepage all over again.
- richardsocher 5y agoSorry it came off as hostile. Lots of bad extensions out there. Ours only has write access to one setting field. No read access. Chrome tells you. But we dropped it entirely so you can try it out any way you like :) Thanks for your feedback.