It’s difficult to convince users to switch search engines. That’s one reason why public search service startups rarely succeed. Another is

Y Combinator-backed Andi taps AI to build a better search engine

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2022-09-23 04:00:22

It’s difficult to convince users to switch search engines. That’s one reason why public search service startups rarely succeed. Another is that it’s expensive to index a huge number of websites (Google has an estimated tens of billions of pages indexed), but one Y Combinator-backed company, Andi, is undeterred — forging ahead to build an AI assistant that provides answers instead of links when searching online.

Andi was founded by Angela Hoover, who registered for YC’s Startup School after dropping out of college and got into YC’s Winter 2022 Batch. After working overseas in construction and with Microsoft as a data center project administrator, Hoover met Andi’s co-founder, Jed White, at the Denver airport upon her return to the U.S.

Hoover and White — who had a background in AI and search, specifically content quality ranking, querying and classification — talked about how bad web search had become for things like travel and what it would take to build a new type of search engine from scratch.

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