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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

#111

Post by dehrmann »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #90
dopeboy wrote: post #68

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…

I think consumers care a lot about privacy, it's just not clear to most of them just how much it's being violated on a daily basis.

I suspect how much they care about privacy depends on how the pollster asks the question.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#112

Post by EscapeFromNY »

dehrmann wrote: post #105
nugget wrote: post #27

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?

That, and also bundling their browser (and hence their search engine) inside lots of popular apps during the late '00s and early '10s.

Remember these prompts? https://www.thewindowsclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ch...

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#113

Post by AlexanderTheGr8 »

freediver wrote: post #94
djbusby wrote: post #73

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…

Thank you for your detailed response. It's illuminating. That being said, isn't this mostly speculative? Time after time, we have seen majority of people choose ads over subscription. The only successful digital subscription models have been for streaming (netflix etc), ecommerce (amazon etc); basically things that have never been ads-supported.

I have never seen a service/industry move from ads to subscription. People will watch as many ads as you throw at them to avoid paying.

For example, even though youtube keeps increasing ads to an annoying level, vast majority of public is willing to grovel through that rather than pay for it. What evidence do you have that makes you think that that will change?

Please don't get me wrong. I admire someone creating a new and different search engine but if you keep growing in size, I believe you will face the same pressures that google/bing/etc faced and go the same route they did. "The king is dead, long live the king" scenario.

PS : remember larry and sergey warned about advertising incentives in their research paper as well but once you see the 9-10-11-12 digit figures on a piece of paper, idealistic morality usually goes out the window.

Ofc this is just my "educated guess at best, speculation at worst". I have a lot less information than you in this field.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#114

Post by emrah »

emrah wrote: post #30
freediver wrote: post #8

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…

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

I see some people are downvoting my comment because it is suggesting an option that uses AI

I'm not biased, i neither like or dislike AI or any other tech.

Perplexity seems to use gpt-3 under the hood but i couldn't care less about that. What i care about is that it allows me to dig into and learn new subjects in a way that was not possible before.

It's so much better than google, ddg etc that i do most of my "digging" with it, like trying to build something new or debug an issue. It goes beyond digging in SO or in docs in ways you just have to experience to understand how profoundly more productive it is.

And I'd love to have more options. Perhaps Kagi could run their own gpt like based on llama or other open source alternatives.

To each their own, if you still want to stick with traditional search, I'm sure those will still be around

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#115

Post by summerlight »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #90
dopeboy wrote: post #68

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…

I think consumers care a lot about privacy, it's just not clear to most of them just how much it's being violated on a daily basis.

This is a common misconception rife across regular "techie" audiences. Many consumers do understand its privacy implication (+ads) and they consider it as a plausible economical trade-off to freely use the service. Some younger people even see it as utility! (which to be honest I don't fully understand yet) This is why those privacy narrative doesn't resonate well across the majority. If you want to promote a specific agenda, you first gotta understand the target audience rather than the topic.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#116

Post by dopeboy »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #90
dopeboy wrote: post #68

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…

I think consumers care a lot about privacy, it's just not clear to most of them just how much it's being violated on a daily basis.

Let me refine: consumers care about privacy but are OK sacrificing it for convenience.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#117

Post by freediver »

AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #113
freediver wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for your detailed response. It's illuminating. That being said, isn't this mostly speculative? Time after time, we have seen majority of people choose ads over subscription. The only successful digital subscription models have been for streaming (netflix etc), ecommerce (amazon etc); basically things that have never been ads-supported. I have never seen a service/industry move from ads to subscription. Peop…

The example you gave is actually quite telling actually. There are already 25 million people who pay for Youtube Premium today. By any account that is a tremendously large number for a product that really does not offer any innovation or advantage over the ad-supported version. So people are ready.

And ad-free search products like the one Kagi is building are able to offer much more value and features than their ad-supported counterparts (which are inherinetly restricted by the nature of the business model and their customer being different than their user).

To be clear, I do not think that in two or even five years paid search will rule the world in a way that ad-supported search does now, but I think that enough people will realize that access to information that has only their best interest in mind will make them more productive and competitive in the future world, and make paying for search a much more viable option than today.

Have more thoughts about this in "The age of pagerank is over" blog post if you want to spare a moment. [1]

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#118

Post by tpmx »

zamnos wrote: post #102
rkagerer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you purport to build a search engine without building an index?

Building a bot to crawl all of the Internet and save it to an index is a fairly straightforwards task. As Google and Pagerank proved though, it's the algorithm you use to search that index that's valuable. Any idiot can try and run grep against said index and give 30,000 results, of which the one you want is on page 53. So writing the crawler to build the index isn't really a competitive advantage. Why then reinvent…

You're conflating crawling with querying/ranking in a weird way. And: grep - are you serious?

(Yes, you also namedropped Pagerank for some odd reason.)

The thing is, though: You can't easily outsource the crawling and then do the quering/ranking inhouse. The reverse index and various other data structures you need are inherently tied to the data structures from the crawler output. This is a very large amount of data and it's changing often.

The outsourcing that is being done is at the "search query to results" level. That is why this is so disappointing.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#119

Post by ignoramous »

tpmx wrote: post #44
m-i-l wrote: post #25

Note 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]. [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/neeva [1] https://www.protocol.com/neeva-search

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

One of the neeva co-founders claimed that they built their own real-time index from the get-go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34333817

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#120

Post by jimsimmons »

freediver wrote: post #94
djbusby wrote: post #73

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…

Sorry this is totally unsubstantiated fantasy. You’re not even wrong. I don’t know how to point that out here
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