According to an article in TechCrunch this afternoon, “Richard Socher, former chief scientist at Salesforce,” is looking to take on Google with a new search engine. To me, the most interesting aspect of this article was the domain name that was chosen for this new brand: You.com.
In doing some research about the You.com domain name, it appears that there is a connection with Salesforce Founder and CEO Marc Benioff. Historical Whois records at DomainTools show Mr. Benioff was listed as the registrant of the You.com domain name several years ago. The domain name has been registered under Whois privacy for a number of years, so it is unclear whether he is currently the registrant.
I did a Google search to see if I could learn more about Mr. Benioff and You.com, and I found a New York Post article from when Mr. Benioff and his wife Lynne Benioff acquired Time magazine:
“The name of the company he formed to make the Time acquisition does not appear to have much staying power as the permanent new moniker of the corporation. It was dubbed: You.com Global LLC.”
A search of Archive.org shows that You.com has not been used very much over the years.
According to the TechCrunch article, Mr. Benioff is backing You.com in some capacity, although details about his involvement were not shared beyond this:
“Socher said he has funding and a team together working actively on the product, but wouldn’t share how much or how many employees at this point. He did say that Benioff and venture capitalist Jim Breyer are primary backers and he would have more information to share in the coming months.”
It will be interesting to see if You.com achieves its goal and becomes a competitor to Google. It’s pretty clear that they have a great domain name already.
Basically, Salesforce to take on Google in Search. Fun times ahead.
Google is already a dynamic force…just like Amazon. Their brands are already branded in our brain.
I ordered stuffs on Amazon, cheaper and faster- how can you beat that. You don’t need to be prime member to get next day shipping, they just give it to me.
Nobody can beat these 2 companies!!
You.com is the perfect name for their idea. They may want to make a portal that supports “you”. I bet they will build the infrastructure for people development. They provide you the templates, email and access and you provide your content that you control freely and not cookie-cutter like FB. They are the homestead or platform for you to build on. It’s timely. Here is what is on their page that leads me to believe this:
“Get early access and join the raffle to get you.com/yourname!”
Embarrassing, it looks as bad as the voice.com social media play.
What is the compelling reason to use this site?
“Get early access and join the raffle to get you.com/yourname!”
Very funny, go read the TOS, and you are giving your soul away.
Sadly; because it is at least 10 years too late (e.g. “Google” is now a verb) they will fail. Whenever others come up with better searching tech, Google simply incorporates that tech in their own search engine.
Because the Supreme and Federal Appeals Courts have made it so difficult to protect computer and internet-related / required tech to be protected with patents (see, e.g. the Alice decision from 2014) — and Congress has so far refused to abrogate limits these unconstitutional limites on patentable subject matter — new startups don’t stand a chance against Big Tech.
They don’t have any better tech. It it just bunch of vague promises about not screwing people over and not making any money, negative crap that nobody cares about.
These guys don’t have a clue what they are doing, too much money and no genuine plan.
Googles search results got so bad that a search with funding can get market share easy. But I don’t like the domain since you can make it a verb. I’ve ever heard people on TV say “bing it”. I don’t think they will say “you it”. Even people that use DuckDuckGo can say “duck it”
Never heard of a single person saying that Google search “got bad”. The only people I have seen complaining is SEO type people and those running sites.
Nobody is going to get market share “easy”. Completely sewn up market.
if you never heard anyone complain google search got bad then you don’t talk to many people. Every search result is the same. Search for any kind of restaurant, search result is just a doorway page to multiple yelp pages. Seach for any kind of contractor, then google is just a doorway page to angieslist. Most small business owners hate google, because they always give the same results for every search category.