101–110 of 301 posts
That being said google is still the best search, but it's been arbitrarily getting worse for years.
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
How can you purport to build a search engine without building an index?
Why then reinvent the wheel and spend untold amount of resources re-crawling the web, when Bing will let you use theirs? What secret sauce for crawling web pages does doing your own crawl bring to the table?
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.
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…
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens in two years?
Let me have a stab at this: We will be at the end of the AI hype cycle we are currently in. Majority of AI/search startups that exist today will no longer be around, failing to find a viable business model that has a hope of profitability, as stuffing ads inside will put them in direct trajectory of Google/Microsoft's insane resources. Google and Microsoft situation will be much better defined. One of these companies…
I use Google for quick searches as it still seems to be the best. I mean queries like "Tajikistan capital".
I use ChatGPT often when I am doing something not directly related to my field of work- like a quick web page after 3 months I did it last time.
I rarely use DuckDuckGo.
I use Kagi, too, sometimes when Google fails, and it is not in the territory of AI chatbots.
I also know about phind and hasn’t used it often.
I knew about Neeva and just didn't see where it fits.
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
Microsoft is also not letting people use the Bing API for AI anymore. I was curious if Neeva would survive that. I guess we have the answer.
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…
Ironically, if you're signed out of Google, it likely has better privacy than smaller, privacy-focused search engines because they have much tighter internal data and IT controls.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You're talking about being the default search engine in Firefox and Safari, right?