As per reports, You.com, a startup looking to challenge Alphabet Inc.’s Google by developing a more customizable search engine, is being backed by a $20 million investment led by the venture fund of Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) Chief Executive Marc Benioff. Benioff’s inclusion with the startup includes the transfer of the You.com domain name, which was owned by him since the 1990s.
For years, venture capitalists lacked interest in backing Google competitors because of its strong dominance in internet searching across the globe. However, the growing consumer privacy concerns and a resurgence of antitrust scrutiny on Google from United States regulators and elsewhere has led to an opening, as seen by some investors.
Founded last year by two former top AI scientists at Salesforce, You.com allows users to set preferred websites, for example, users who wish to get information from Reddit and Yelp would see rows of search results from those services ahead of links from the broader web. Co-founder and CEO Richard Socher informed that You.com will not track users across the web nor sell “privacy-invasive ads”, adding that the company will not log searches and clicks when users opt for an incognito mode.
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