Yea... We found that without the convenience of a navbar search most people won't give it a proper try and stick to the monopoly of Google.
Users also told us that once it was their default, they realized it's great (or sometimes just "good enough") for them to stay with us. Our retention is super high once it's default but when people only try one search like "abc" or "weather" -- they often won't then change their default.
It's tricky to fully try a search engine with just one search. They're so important for so many aspects of our lives.
That being said, we hope we can eventually drop this requirement when we can be a default option in more browsers.
Also, you can try it in incognito mode and any non Chrome browser.
If you set your search engine default to you.com manually in Chrome with "https://you.com/search?q=%s" you will not need the extension either... but for most people convenience wins and well... it's tough to go up against a monopoly?
sorry for the snarky comment. Did not mean to offend and I take back the rudeness. That said, after doing 10 or so test queries in an incognito browser I still do not understand how the horizontal search results are any different than a vertical search.
The extra information is nice, but looking at stock tickers isn't my primary objective when searching online.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html