We will be shutting down neeva.com

What will happen to the code? Will any become open source?

I hadn't heard of this website, SiliconAngle.com, before this week but they interviewed someone from the company that I work at (not for this Neeva article; for a different article), so they're actually a real news reporting organization. I was reading that article with my colleague's interview this week when I saw the Snowflake + Neeva article title in the sidebar on SiliconAngle.com

https://siliconangle.com/2023/05/17/report-claims-snowflake-...

The Silicon Angle article cites another article from The Information as being the source of the Snowflake + Neeva news: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/snowflake-in-talks-t...

(I don't have a subscription to The Information, so unfortunately I cannot read that article's whole text. If someone with a subscription to The Information could summarize that article and share their summary with the community here I'd appreciate it!)

The team at Neeva was A+. It is quite commendable that they managed to build a real search engine (unlike DuckDuckGo which is a shim on Bing) that was comparable to Google with such a small team.

Neeva aimed to solve the problem of ads clogging the entire search results page with an ad-free search experience. My opinion of Neeva was that it solved a problem that doesn't exist. Anyone who is annoyed with ads can install uBlock (or one of the other extensions) and hide them all.

There is an all out war for search supremacy right now between two trillion dollar companies, with one having everything to win and the other everything to lose. In those circumstances a standard VC model of buying growth does not work even if you have a huge war chest, as you will be outspent no matter how big your investors are.

As a founder of a startup in the same space (Kagi) we feel these challenges. We face difficult decisions every day. It is hard but I am cautiously optimistic about our approach. All I know is that when the dust settles in two years, we still plan to be around.

Big props to the Neeva team for educating the market about the existence of ad-free search and paving the way for bootstrapped companies like ours.

Appreciate the honest retrospective.

This combined with the reports that Bing failed to cut into Google’s market show that Google is safe for a while.

I wonder if I’ll see disruption of Google’s core business in my lifetime. I really want it to happen but it’s a mighty quest