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We will be shutting down neeva.com

neeva.com

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Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#31

Post by NelsonMinar »

What a shame. I really liked Neeva the times I used it, although not quite enough to replace Google for me. They were the most credible alternative for an English-based true competitor to Google and Bing, the distant second.

Genuinely surprised they aren't annoying being acquired; their traditional search expertise would make a great companion to someone doing LLM-based information retrieval. (Not to mention their in-house LLM expertise).

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#33

Post by extheat »

jimsimmons wrote: post #10

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

Failed makes it sound like things are over. Bing Chat is still under a waitlist, they're just getting started in terms of LLM integration into Search.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#34

Post by jessfyi »

They never seemed focused on their core mission of delivering better search results than Google and instead felt like they were constantly jumping from trend to trend to draw hype and subsequent funding rounds (the neeva.xyz crypto pivot is when I jumped off the train.) Simply being ad-free or "privacy" focused was never going to be enough for the average consumer or the user who wanted results beyond typical SEO spam, low quality news, or overviews lacking actual depth.

As Google replaces more and more of their knowledge-graph powered backend with instant "answers" and LLMs (something on-going since 2013 with the release of Hummingbird, with the integration of BERT, and now with Bard and the increasing pressure from stakeholders blinded by AI hype) which I think contributes more to the degradation of their platform there'll be an even clearer need and opportunity for a competitor in the space. Neeva was never going to be that team.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#36

Post by ergocoder »

anilshanbhag wrote: post #6

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 insta…

People are annoyed by ads, but really it is not that much of an annoyance.

Neeva solves the smallest pain point ever exists.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#37

Post by mgreg »

flakiness wrote: post #16
anilshanbhag wrote: post #6

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 insta…

AFAIK Neeva does use Bing [1]. You might be confused with Brave [2], which claims to be Bing-fee. * [1] https://neeva.com/massets/ask-neeva/does-neeva-use-bing.html * [2] https://brave.com/search-independence/

And this is a critical point. Not only has Microsoft raised the pricing for their Bing Search API massively (a cost to Neeva and others) there are rumors that they were starting to enforce some terms of service that prevents the use of the API for many things including training LLMs.

Note - they took down their page on the pricing update that was here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing-update; article about it at https://www.ghacks.net/2023/02/17/microsoft-increases-bing-s... and the pricing is still published at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing.

"Microsoft threatens to restrict data from rival AI search tools" https://money.yahoo.com/microsoft-threatens-restrict-data-ri...

Bing Search API ToS: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/legal

edit to add links

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#38

Post by greyman »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #31

What a shame. I really liked Neeva the times I used it, although not quite enough to replace Google for me. They were the most credible alternative for an English-based true competitor to Google and Bing, the distant second. Genuinely surprised they aren't annoying being acquired; their traditional search expertise would make a great companion to someone doing LLM-based information retrieval. (Not to mention their in…

This is strange, I tried it a few times via Poe app, where they integrated it recently, and the results were very weak. Good alternative to Bing is phind.com in my opinion.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#39

Post by ragnarsson »

jimsimmons wrote: post #10

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

I have written crawlers for a while, most sites are unfriendly to anything other than Google (maybe they spare bing as well), some make it downright impossible without extensive work on evading their blocking techniques.

I expect (but can not confirm) this is the same reason why search engines like ddg and you.com also rely on bing's indexes.

Google's supremacy is here to stay. Only threat is bing or someone that comes with some excellent tech that bing incorporates (like openai) but actually works for search and is not just a LLM.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#40

Post by raddan »

ergocoder wrote: post #36
anilshanbhag wrote: post #6

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 insta…

People are annoyed by ads, but really it is not that much of an annoyance. Neeva solves the smallest pain point ever exists.

It clearly depends on your perspective. I found the quantity of ads on Google to be a genuine impediment and happily switched to being a paying user of Neeva. For the vast majority of searches, Neeva was better for me. Most pointedly, Neeva was even better when I searched for things that I intended to purchase, because the results were not simply paid advertisements.

RIP

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