Use Cases

Simple Search

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If you’re new to the You.com API, this is the right place to begin. Before building RAG pipelines or research agents, you need to understand the foundation: the Search API. Send a query. Get back accurate web and news results.

The Search API gives you direct access to You.com’s search index — the same index that powers our Research API and our own search engine. You get titles, URLs, and descriptions for the most relevant pages on the web, fast. Then, you decide what to do with them: filter them, rank them, display them in a UI or feed them into a language model to synthesize an answer.

This example shows the simplest possible way to call it: a Python script and a small Next.js web app you can deploy to Vercel.

Prerequisites

Get a You.com API key

Sign up at you.com/platform to get your API key.

Run It

The quickest way to see the API in action is the command line.

$pip install -r requirements.txt
$export YDC_API_KEY="your-api-key-here"
$python simple_search.py "what is retrieval augmented generation"

No query? No problem — the example falls back to a default one, so python simple_search.py works too.

What you get back:

  Title: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) - IBM
  URL: https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/retrieval-augmented-generation
  Description: RAG is an AI framework that combines the strengths of traditional information
               retrieval systems with the capabilities of generative large language models.

Each result has a title, URL, and a short description pulled from the page. Clean, structured, ready to use.

How It Works

Both the script and the web app do the same three things:

  1. Take a search query
  2. Call the You.com Search API via the Python or TypeScript SDK
  3. Display the title, URL, and description for each result

The web app just adds a layer of UI on top: a search input, result cards with favicons, and You.com branding. The API route (app/api/search/route.ts) keeps your key server-side.

What’s Next

Research API

Instead of raw results, get a synthesized, cited answer written by an agent that reads the web for you.

Private RAG

Use your own documents to ground an LLM response — no web search needed.

Search API Reference

Full docs for filtering by freshness, country, language, and more.

Resources