Sad to see them go. I just learned about Neeva and Kagi a couple weeks ago. In general the search results on both of them seem to be much better compared to google but I've mostly used Neeva so far because of the lack of need to log in.
We will be shutting down neeva.com
21–30 of 301 posts
Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com
#22There 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 di…
Bing doesn't need to win — they just want Google to be a little less profitable.
Or a lot less profitable.
“From now on, the [gross margin] of search is going to drop forever,” Nadella said in an interview with the Financial Times.
“There is such margin in search, which for us is incremental. For Google it’s not, they have to defend it all,” he added, referring to the competition against Google as “asymmetric”.
https://www.ft.com/content/2d48d982-80b2-49f3-8a83-f5afef98e...
It's 50% of Google's revenue, and they'll suffer immensely if this goes away.
Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com
#23I think this is the first I’ve heard of Neeva!
Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com
#24There 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 di…
I am a big fan of Kagi and a happy paying customer for more than year already. Thank you for such a great product and pleas keep going and growing!
Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com
#25Note that Neeva wasn't exactly a small player, managing to burn through $77.5M in VC funding over the space of just 3 years[0]. Note also that, at least at the start of that 3 year period, they simply bought in results from Bing rather than build their own index[1].
Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com
#26Wanted to try Neeva since they launched, but DuckDuckGo has served me well over the years and I can't really complain about the results. Only on a rare occasion do I need to make a long-tail query where I surmise Google/Neeva will do a better job at results. That's once every ~1000 DDG searches though, and I append a !g command to my query to redirect to The Google in that case.
I will continue to use Kagi[0], keeping in mind that could be shutdown without notice too, so I'll probably end up using it more now.
Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com
#27There 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 di…
Neeva failed because they didn’t understand distribution. Sundar became a rising star and ultimately CEO of Google because he directly managed more paid distribution and user acquisition for Google search than anyone else. Not a coincidence. Google promotes the narrative that they organically grew to dominate the search market when in fact they spent many billions of dollars on user acquisition (while also, for most of that time, having the best product).
Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com
#28Related:
"Almost all founders learn brutal lessons during the first year, but some learn them much more quickly. Obviously those founders are more likely to succeed. So it could be a useful heuristic to ask, say 6 to 12 months in, "Have we learned our brutal lesson yet?"" - https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1659122079071870977
"The most common lesson is that customers don't want what you're making. The next most common is that it isn't possible to make it, or at least to make it profitably."
Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com
#29 throughout this journey, we’ve discovered that
it is one thing to build a search engine,
and an entirely different thing to convince
regular users of the need to switch to a
better choice
I wouldn't be surprised if the future of search comes from an unexpected angle. The cost to train a model which has basic understanding of the world and human language might drop enough that hobbyists can do it. And then domain specific knowledge might be learned on top of that seperately, creating "specialist LLMs". A web of such LLMs with domain specific knowledge might be able to answer questions better than a single large net. Similar to how humans work in teams of specialists.
Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com
#30There 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 di…
Kagi is great. Please have a look at perplexity.ai and get inspired. We need more good options available