[primitivesuave]

I appreciate the reply and opportunity to open dialog. I think the flaw in that reasoning is that you're not talking specifically about people for whom search is a problem. Someone searching for the weather forecast, or something that strongly references a Wikipedia article, is already getting a good search experience. People like me, on the other hand, are power users of Google but consistently struggle to quickly find information.

I downloaded the extension so I could reciprocate with useful feedback. First let me say I appreciate the minimal design, although it would be nice if my re-ordering and configuration of the interface remained the same between searches (if I hit the arrows to push Stack Overflow results to the top, every subsequent search pushes it down to a random position). I ran some of my Google searches from earlier today - one was "typescript define class as type", since I didn't really know exactly how to describe the TS syntax I wanted. The second Google result was to a Stack Overflow answer that effectively resolved my query - this answer isn't in the SO results when I searched on You, and the overall search experience for that one isn't great. Obviously that is an edge case with imprecise wording, but it's the best example I could come up with for why it's hard to ditch Google (even though many of us want to).

I ran some other queries where You was actually a much better experience - I was searching for a specific JS library (Nunjucks) and entering queries like "nunjucks define a filter" - the Google results start with a link to the documentation, followed by endless low-quality blog posts. On You, I could easily scroll through and see that people are talking on Reddit about the library - right now I effectively do the same thing on Google by adding "site:news.ycombinator.com" before a query.

Again, appreciate the reply and look forward to following your progress. I am sure that even the naysayers here can agree that it would be nice to see an end to search monopolization :)

Edit: FYI, to add to the argument against the Chrome extension, the moment I navigated to google.com I got a prompt with "yes" as the default answer for switching back to Google as the default search. So I really don't think fighting the search monopoly in this way is going to be easy - to echo another commenter, DuckDuckGo has managed to build a successful business off great search results alone.