You.com

All 51 visible comments come from HackerNews threads around You.com's launch, and the sentiment is skeptical-to-negative, driven by trust and UX issues rather than outright search failure. Dominant themes: (1) Onboarding failure — the site initially required a browser extension to run searches in Chrome/Chromium (it worked extension-free in Brave), and users resented composing a query only to hit an install wall ('I've already expended the mental effort to produce a search query'). One highly-upvoted commenter later edited: 'I now believe the website was, in fact, changed' — evidence the team dropped the extension requirement mid-thread under pressure. (2) Privacy distrust — the extension's broad permissions (reading/modifying content on all sites) triggered accusations of 'universally tracking all my browser activity.' You.com's CTO (Bryan) publicly denied the extension injects tracking beacons, pointing to open-source code and a div that only detects extension presence on you.com itself. Several users accepted the technical explanation but argued the gap between browser permission warnings and actual behavior still erodes trust for a product marketed as privacy-conscious ('I hope they would have thought about these questions'). (3) Search quality is query-dependent — a 'George Washington' query surfaced a top Wikipedia 'data blob' one dev called 'blatant cheating,' and the default two-row web results layout was called 'disorienting'; a 'jq modify value' dev query returned only tangential results; but a 'GeneratorExecutionContext' (C#) query apparently returned relevant results where Google's first page had none — a partial validation of the 'search for devs' pitch. (4) Community friction — users accused founder Richard of replying 'very defensively' to almost all feedback, with HN moderation (dang) stepping in over a pinned subthread; strategic advice offered included 'if you want to control the search engine, control the web browser.' Net read: a real product with visible iteration speed, but a launch that burned goodwill with its most likely early adopters (privacy-conscious power users and devs).

No aggregate ratings were found for this product during the last harvest.