Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We will be shutting down neeva.com

neeva.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 301 posts

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#61

Post by repeekad »

jessfyi wrote: post #34

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 spa…

I think a perfect example of this is sports. Sports results are objectively better on Neeva than google, in part because they’re not ad driven and can return immersive full page experiences. But I think they got distracted with crypto and AI, neither of which they were ever going to win.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#62

Post by SquareWheel »

rand_flip_bit wrote: post #59
emrah wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi is great. Please have a look at perplexity.ai and get inspired. We need more good options available

Ughh, please don’t. The last thing I want in my search engine is AI, especially for a “privacy focused” one like Kagi. Paying to have all my search queries get routed through ChatGPT (and effectively used as training data) is absolutely not what I want. I suspect it’s too late though, Kagi has already drank the AI koolaid.

> and effectively used as training data

Models are not trained during inference, are they?

Regardless, it seems like LLMs are going to have some role to play in search in the future. It's just not clear what that role is yet.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#63

Post by pd33 »

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/

"Neeva drew on its $80 million in funding to develop its own system to serve results, though it still relies on Bing for image and video searches. "

https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-opened-a-new-era-in-sear...

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#64

Post by mmaunder »

Launched in 2021 and in Europe in 2022. Not much time to iterate or pivot.

I’m not sure that search is a helpful way to think about AI. Search is a 90s concept that describes searching an index of what is on the web for results to a query. Sci-fi authors never described a future world as working that way because it’s not intuitive. What is intuitive is a human asking a computer for outcomes in plain English. I think search is dying. I think ChatGPT is a glimpse of what will replace search.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#65

Post by wombatpm »

jweir wrote: post #18

Neeva was great and I enjoyed using it until… The media bias feature was added. It was silly and probably not cheap to create. The StackOverflow integration was terrible and a misdirection. Completely unusable. Then the LLM came. It was slow and inaccurate and in your face . I asked to have it disabled but found now way. I stopped using it soon after. Too bad. At its core was a great engine from my experience.

I agree 100%. I loved it when I started using 2years ago and have been sad to watch its downward slide for the reasons you indicated. Time to switch to kagi

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#66

Post by joelcloud »

jjeaff wrote: post #42
echelon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... https://archive.is/4JO…

I'm curious what the 50% figure includes? Because my understanding is that about 60% of Google's total revenue is search ads, and if you include network ads (which would be relevant since they are at risk from AI as well) then it is more like 70%.

Adsense revenue from different websites will drop because it will be summarized and cost per query will go up. This AI push will backfire

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#67

Post by rand_flip_bit »

SquareWheel wrote: post #62
rand_flip_bit wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ughh, please don’t. The last thing I want in my search engine is AI, especially for a “privacy focused” one like Kagi. Paying to have all my search queries get routed through ChatGPT (and effectively used as training data) is absolutely not what I want. I suspect it’s too late though, Kagi has already drank the AI koolaid.

> and effectively used as training data Models are not trained during inference, are they? Regardless, it seems like LLMs are going to have some role to play in search in the future. It's just not clear what that role is yet.

100% the data you input to the ChatGPT 4 prompt window is being used to train ChatGPT 5, there is a reason a lot of companies are placing bans on it and telling employees to never enter sensitive data.

I sincerely hope that LLMs won’t play a role in search, I don’t need a search engine trying to infer what I “meant” to type, Google and DDG started doing that and pushed me to Kagi as a result. Just take the words I type verbatim and search them in your index, don’t assume this is my first time using the internet.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#68

Post by dopeboy »

Much respect to Neeva for being in the arena. Couple thoughts:

* Outside of the HN crowd, I don't think the average consumer thinks of privacy as a differentiator.

* I don't know if competing on general search is the way in. I think you need a wedge, and these new companies competing on a certain vertical (like search tools for developers). I see promise here, with specialized LLMs in the backend.

* The biggest search engine in the world comes as the default option on the most popular browser and the most popular phone operating system. Even if your results are 10x better, that's a huge hurdle to overcome.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#69

Post by tpmx »

kossTKR wrote: post #50
tpmx wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]. That sounds to me like they failed hard, both from a technical point of view and marketing-wise. (This is the first time I've heard of them.) Simply burning through lots of money is not an interesting factor. Edit: I tried it out: https://i.imgur.com/0YBorgG.png

Never heard of Neeva either. Sometimes i wonder how much "business" is about getting gov. subsidies, grants or scamming the masses, then distributing wealth to friends and family horizontally to elite peers. Amounts that seem absurd to billions of working class people disappear on the daily apparently with zero value ever created - i've seen this happen enough times IRL to realise that most business is part performan…

> businesstheater

I've seen a lot of that crap on e.g. the Oslo Stock Exchange over the past two decades. Lots of money from local and very inexperienced (e.g. fishing/shipping/oil money) companies/people, looking to invest in tech and often randomly landing on investing in quite far out gambles where it's legitimitely really hard to figure out of there's an intent of fraud or not. The exec teams tend to draw disgustingly high comps though. Then the weird companies get insanely hyped for no reason by local "economy journalists". Then there's loads of insider leaks and trading. Oslo Stock Exchange is like the wild west.

I thought this was largely isolated to small immature markets like e.g. Norway though.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#70

Post by repeekad »

jweir wrote: post #18

Neeva was great and I enjoyed using it until… The media bias feature was added. It was silly and probably not cheap to create. The StackOverflow integration was terrible and a misdirection. Completely unusable. Then the LLM came. It was slow and inaccurate and in your face . I asked to have it disabled but found now way. I stopped using it soon after. Too bad. At its core was a great engine from my experience.

Yup, they got distracted and didn’t seem to focus on their core mission. So much focus on crypto, then growth features like “media bias”, then AI which they had zero hope in winning. It felt like they were always chasing their tail.
Post reply on HN