Search Engines and AI has been the talk of the decade and in 2023 the trend seems to be at an all-time high. With Google almost dominating the market with negligible competition, many have been looking for search engine alternatives in recent years.
In 2020, Richard Socher, former chief scientist at Salesforce cofounded You.com, An AI-Powered search engine which uses its powerful AI to analyse queries and rank answers appropriately. The major difference is that it has the ability to parse even programming languages and to complete small tasks on the Search Engine results page itself.
This is because, unlike traditional Search Engines, You.com has been able to integrate apps into the search engine ecosystem in a way that it allows for performing a number of tasks without the user having to leave the search engine.
This also includes generating lines of code by utilising GitHub’s Copilot, based on the Search Engine Query.
YouWrite also has its own set of Apps for example, YouWrite which can write captions, blog posts, and generate small articles and essay ideas.
How Do Traditional Search Engines Work?
Traditional Search Engines like Google uses a complex AI algorithm which ranks results based on a local index that is created dynamically from a larger index each time a user makes a search query.
The process involves:
Crawling: Google uses spiders or bots which follow links from one page to another and can scan and index the content they find along the way.
Indexing: If the links are satisfactory as per Google’s Webmaster guidelines then they are added to its vast index of information for ranking.
Processing: When a user enters a search query into Google, the search engine analyses the words in the query and the information in its index to determine which web pages are the most relevant to the search. This is done using complex algorithms and extensive data processing.
With each query, Google’s algorithms attempt to sort through this vast amount of data quickly and accurately to provide users with the most relevant results.
Ranking: Google uses a range of criteria to rank web pages in terms of relevance. These criteria include the relevance of the content to the search query, the quality of the content on the webpage, and the number and quality of other sites linking to the webpage.
Results: After searching, the final step is to present the results to the user. Google displays a list of web pages it determines to be the most pertinent to the search query, with the most relevant pages appearing at the top.
How does You.com Work?
Unlike Traditional Search Engines, You.com relies heavily on User Feedback to rank results against user queries. It works like this:
- Based on the Initial AI Training the AI ranks the most relevant results on You.com based on the search query.
- The user consumes the results and votes on the basis of how helpful was each result for the user.
- Based on the number of user votes, the search rankings change. This involves real-time changes to rankings as per the continuous change in User Upvotes.
- At You.com, we believe in democratizing the search experience. That’s why their social voting system is designed to give users direct control over website rankings by relying on their input rather than a complex algorithm.
How to Optimize your Website for You.com?
Although You.com hasn’t provided explicit access to search engine tools like Google search console to optimize our rankings, in our experience these are some of the best tips to optimize your search engine for ranking in You.com
Build Trust Signals
Whether it’s Google or You.com, search engines will always rank results from trustworthy sources. Having strong Backlink signals and quality content aligned with the Google search quality rater’s guidelines is important for ranking on You.com as well.
Expand Website Functionality with Web Apps
You.com have found a new way of integrating App functionality in search engines to enable the user to perform a variety of tasks without ever having to leave the search engine results page.
This enables by various web apps which are indexable by You.com. It is hence preferable to improve your website and provide various functionality like Web Applications to further enhance your website visibility on You.com.
Create Apps and Submit them to App Stores
You.com is also capable of pulling results directly from the App Store and Play Store. This makes App Store Optimization a very important SEO Strategy to rank well in “Search Engines of the Future”. You.com can rank such results and also provide various public functionalities that can be performed directly on the SERP itself.
Focus on User Engagement
Last but not the least, focus on creating interactive experiences for your customer on the Website or through Apps. You.com focuses heavily on customer feedback through votes.
Hence it’s really important to match the user intent for search queries. If the user has commercial intent, offer price comparisons and on-site product catalogues. If the user is looking for information, provide deep contextual content with images, videos and relevant links that can enable the user to feel satisfied.
Focusing on quality will help in getting more upvotes and hence improve the prospect of ranking on You.com
