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Comment by richardsocher | Hacker News Reader

Yea... Requiring the extension for navbar searches was a tough choice.

You actually can try it out in incognito mode and any other browser. But we found that without the convenience of a navbar search, most people won't give it a proper try either way.

I hope we can drop this requirement even in Chrome when we become one of the default options. We will implement an a/b test and see if we can get rid of the requirement even earlier.

If you set your search engine default to https://you.com manually in Chrome with "https://you.com/search?q=%s" you will not need the extension... but for most people convenience wins and well...

It's tough to go up against a monopoly that controls the browser too?

You can find more details for every browser setup here: https://youdotcom.notion.site/Make-You-com-your-default-sear...

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Is there a way for me to use it without omnibar integration? I'd really prefer to leave my search engine as-is...

Type the URL manually? Your browser might even auto-URL-encode the search terms for you so you don't have to bother doing it yourself.

I tried, all roads lead me to the message prompting me to install the extension.

add &fromSearchBar=false to the end of the search, so the search string looks like this:

https://you.com/search?q=%s&fromSearchBar=false

that's it. very easy if you're technical. of course, we don't want to block our users. we are just trying to make it convenient and easy to have navbar searches - we found that if you're not in the navbar yngmi..

I'm not going to tell you your business, but you're not improving your 'making it' quotient by adding a piece of middleware to the process.

At best, it's subtly hostile. At worst, it's highly annoying and increases my threat surface by introducing Yet Another Browser Extension that is exceedingly vulnerable to supply chain attacks.

> very easy if you're technical. of course, we don't want to block our users. we are just trying to make it convenient and easy to have navbar searches

FWIW this comes off as very hollow. Your responses elsewhere seem to suggest you are doing this because you think you need the level of stickiness installing an extension implies to compete with Google (presumably to build out a small but fervent base of initial users who use you.com fanatically) and you therefore need to forcefully prod users into installing the extension. Therefore you're intentionally putting in friction on the casual usage path to really capture that initial core audience.

That sounds fine to me if stated like that. The way you stated it here leaves a bad taste in my mouth, akin to when some companies give extremely flowery, ostensibly user-centric justifications for why prices are being raised (the answer is the company doesn't think its current profits are high enough, and often won't survive with the lower prices, which is reason enough, not anything to do with helping users directly).

You're a startup. You need to get a core group of sticky users and you're introducing friction to do that. I understand that. You don't need to justify it in other language.

EDIT: Removed "cloak" and replaced with "justify" because that's rather unfair of me to say it was cloaking.

>we don't want to block our users. we are just trying to make it convenient and easy to have navbar searches

You are, quite literally, blocking potential users by putting a wall up in front of your search engine instead of trusting them to just remember to search at "you.com". Your workarounds are just more walls (opening an incognito window, adding URL parameters, etc) that aren't feasible: if you don't trust someone to remember "you.com", they're definitely not going to remember to also add `&fromSearchBar=false` to their queries.

It comes off as user-hostile. It makes me think you think so little of me (or other users) that I need my hand held through changing my search engine. I don't, and I don't appreciate a search engine treating me like I'm stupid.

yes, you can just go into incognito mode. we care a lot about privacy so we didn't want to mess with that. it should just work when you're in incognito mode. if you then also go into private mode - you'll have the MOST privacy preserving search experience that we know of, certainly even better than DDG:

Here's our blog post about how we think about the privacy-convenience tradeoff:

https://youdotcom.notion.site/Privacy-and-Data-Protection-at...

That's indeed unfortunate, I hope you reconsider.

yea. we'll revisit it from time to time. most people who REALLY dont want to install our extension probably won't do it after 2 searches either?

and sadly, the 2tr$ monopoly that is Google made this the only way for us to provide the convenience of a navbar search right now?

hopefully we can be a default option at some point or we'll have to build our own browser :)

I'd wager most people wouldn't want to install your extension before 2 searches, to see if it's even worth using.

A handful of searches seems entirely reasonable to test out a service before downloading an extension that only exists to change your default settings to use it.

I'd definitely be more likely to download an extension for something I'm already using than I am to download an extension for something I've never even seen in use.

I don't know if I want to use your search engine, it is literally impossible for me to set it as my homepage and use it casually. I really wish I could give it a proper chance, but your tacit denial of what is obviously bad design has come back to bite you in the butt. You're making the exact same mistakes the Brave browser did, if you don't back down on a feature that the majority of users are telling you to change, you'll have a hard time proselytizing in the future.

Honestly, I won't install your extension because I don't know who you are. Having it as an option would be great. People here have seen _many_ stories about extensions being silently updated with malware.

I really hope you reconsider. So far I've got great results for the queries I ran in Incognito mode, but I will not install an extension just so I can change my search engine.

https://you.com/search?q=stuff

> I'd really prefer to leave my search engine as-is

That's a tough start for trying out a new search engine :)

But yes, you can go into incognito mode or manually set your navbar, or try a different browser.

Who exactly are you replying to?

lol come on man

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