• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 8, 2020

The former chief scientist at Salesforce, Richard Socher, helped to build the company’s Einstein artificial intelligence platform. Now he wants to take on Google.

The site — you.com — prioritizes “real results” above paid content and ads to ensure that those searching can “trust the integrity” of the results.

A new way of building a search interface aims to help those searching get to the content faster by building each searcher’s own “curated knowledge base,” according to the site, which remains in beta.

In March 2017, he was 33 years old when the San Francisco Business Times included him in their 40 under 40 feature. Now in his mid-thirties, the entrepreneur wants to compete with the largest search engine in the world -- but to do it with a twist.

When asked what else he planned to accomplish by age 40, he told the San Francisco Business Times he wanted to achieve “major breakthroughs in deep learning for natural-language understanding.”

You.com, built with consumer privacy in mind, puts the person in control of their data. Users can choose either a personalized experience or a private one. The personal data is never sold, according to the company.

Socher believes his background in artificial intelligence will help him build a consumer-focused search tool.

He told TechCrunch that the knowledge and insights he gained from working with Marc Benioff at Salesforce made him realize the site can make money and still build trust with the people buying the product. As Google runs into antitrust issues, it could open opportunities for startups like his.

Socher landed at Salesforce following the acquisition of MetaMind in 2016, which he founded. He also helped to create the ImageNet data set, as a Ph.D. student at Stanford University.