81–90 of 301 posts
> Contrary to popular belief, convincing users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place. These things seem related. Was it possible to try neeva for free? Even if so, a search engine is something you have to try again and again to become convinced. I try every free search engine I see on HN, but that's not realistic and…
Yes
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 searc…
Frankly, I think this community is the exact same. Pretend to care about privacy, but convenience comes first. Like, I think the AI fad here is a perfect demonstration. I dunno.
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 di…
Bing doesn't need to win — they just want Google to be a little less profitable.
Bing has failed to take away meaningful marketshare from Google by MSFT’s on admission
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-eyes-firef...
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.
I thought they were getting acquihired by Snowflake?
They talk about how hard it is to convince users to switch: > From the unnecessary friction required to change default search settings, to the challenges in helping people understand the difference between a search engine and a browser, acquiring users has been really hard. How many users are we talking about? That would be great to know and since they're shutting down can they tell us? On a different page[1] they sa…
If you assume 80% of users were 'free' and 20% were paid (which is probably pretty generous), and 'hundreds of thousands' means 200-400k users, annual revenue was maybe $5m - $10m.
There are 74 employees who have listed Neeva as their employer on linkedin, so even assuming that is all staff and that the average salary is $50k-£100k (which seems low?), salary then is somewhere between $3.7 - $7.4m.
So I can absolutely see a world where they were losing a lot of money - if they paid staff $100k and had c300k users of which 20% were paid, they can't even cover staff costs before even considering hosting/user aquisition costs/office space/equipment/software licences etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adsense revenue from different websites will drop because it will be summarized and cost per query will go up. This AI push will backfire
The buggy wip maker couldn't have stopped Ford
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 di…
I’m definitely going to give Kagi a try, I hope you are not restricting results by politics or so.
I’m paying for Chat gpt at the moment but I still need to just search and not to be spoon fed curated results all the time… the moment they include payed advertisement in gpt results is going to feel like browsing in the Truman show.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bing doesn't need to win — they just want Google to be a little less profitable.
At least on HN can we stop parroting this supposed open book strategy from 5D chess Nadella? Bing has failed to take away meaningful marketshare from Google by MSFT’s on admission https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-eyes-firef...
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 searc…