- Richard Socher, a one-time AI boss at Salesforce, is building a search competitor to Google.
- Socher says Google’s search monopoly is under threat as users are now eager to try alternatives.
- You.com is a potential dark horse in the contest to supersede Google Search.
In the fast-paced world of artificial intelligence, the once unassailable dominance of tech giants like Google is being challenged, says Richard Socher, founder and CEO of You.com.
Socher runs a competitor to Google that’s built for knowledge workers. Established as a search engine, You.com has expanded its repertoire over the years by incorporating digital agents for writing essays, browsing the web, and other tasks. To date, the company has raised about $100 million in funding.
In an interview with Business Insider, Socher expressed a belief that the era of a single company maintaining an overwhelming, long-lasting monopoly in the tech industry, similar to what Google experienced in the search domain, is coming to an end.
Socher said users are now more inclined to explore new, artificial intelligence-charged options and switch between services more readily than in the past.
“This sort of insane, untouchable monopoly that Google had for 20 years, those days are over,” Socher said. “I don’t think any company will have such a strong monopoly for such a long time anymore because users are getting faster to switch and more eager to try out things.”
This change in user behavior would imply that companies, even those with significant market power, can no longer rely on maintaining a monopoly based solely on inertia or default settings. Instead, these companies must continuously innovate and provide genuine value to retain their user base.
Meanwhile, new entrants and smaller players like You.com are seizing an opportunity to pick up users who are open to exploring alternatives.
Since launching in 2021, You.com says it has reached “millions” of people. The platform is free to use, with premium features available through a $15 monthly plan. You.com also provides enterprise customers with a toolkit designed to bring real-time web search and accuracy to their own applications.
The company tells Business Insider its revenue has skyrocketed since the beginning of 2024, reaching 100 times the amount earned the previous year.
Before he took on Google Search, Socher founded a deep-learning company called MetaMind that he sold to Salesforce. He became chief scientist at Salesforce, where he led the company’s research efforts and worked on bringing natural language processing and computer vision to its platform.
In 2018, while at Salesforce, Socher published a paper alongside Bryan McCann, a fellow Salesforce research scientist, on multitask learning — a method in machine learning where a model is trained to perform multiple tasks at the same time. The paper influenced subsequent research in the field, with Dario Amodei and Ilya Sutskever citing it in a paper from their lab, OpenAI, a year later.
The research also seeded an idea for a new kind of search engine. Socher remembered thinking, “If you can have one neural network that answers all of your questions, why am I still going to Google where I get these lists of blue links?” In 2020, he and McCann left Salesforce to start You.com. Marc Benioff wrote one of the first checks.
The future of search is still up for grabs, and Socher will have more to contend with than Google. Companies like OpenAI and Perplexity are locked in a contest to offer the most popular chat-based search engine, and ChatGPT’s hundreds of millions of active users make You.com’s user base look feeble. Additionally, OpenAI has considered developing a web browser, The Information reported, while Perplexity has teased a web browser called Comet, which could provide more seamless and integrated user experiences.
In this environment, the real winners of search will be those who anticipate the next big shift and are nimble enough to lead it. As Socher put it, “I made peace with the fact that AI will just keep changing. We’ll have to move quickly.”
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