Tech Disruptors You.com CEO on Reinventing Search for AI Era
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Nov 25, 2025 
Richard Socher, CEO of You.com and a former chief scientist at Salesforce, shares insights on the evolving world of AI-driven search. He explains how You.com differentiates itself through real-time accuracy and privacy-first design while powering search for companies like DuckDuckGo. Socher discusses the challenges of context engineering and the importance of a robust search infrastructure in delivering accurate AI results. He also outlines the competitive landscape and how custom agents are changing productivity dynamics in businesses.
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From Academia To Building AI Search
- Richard Socher recounts building MetaMind, teaching NLP at Stanford, and joining Salesforce where he led AI research and early agents work.
- He explains that u.com began by pairing a search engine with LLMs to produce cited answers and later exposed that tech as AI search infrastructure APIs.
Context Engineering Is The Key Bottleneck
- Context engineering is the bottleneck for accurate AI agents because models need access to heterogeneous data lakes.
- Combining internal and web data plus orchestration determines whether an agent gives correct, non-hallucinated answers.
AI Expands Search Behind The Scenes
- Modern AI increases the number of background searches per user query as agents fetch and synthesize many sources.
- Sophisticated customers benchmark search APIs and often choose u.com for speed, accuracy, and privacy.
