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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

#151

Post by Zak »

collaborative wrote: post #130
Zak wrote: post #75

I'm in the target audience. I know what a search engine is. I know how to change my default search engine in all of my browsers, which I know are distinct from search engines. I care about privacy enough that I default to DuckDuckGo, not Google. It would take some convincing, but I'm neither opposed nor unable to pay for a better search engine. I read HN somewhat regularly. This is the first time I've heard of Neeva.

Distribution is blocked by big tech and even mentioning what you are working on will get you perma banned from most subreddits because of "spam" In fact, HN is a rara avis in that it allows "Show HN" posts

"Hey everyone, I'm working on [commercial product]" from someone who isn't already an active member of a community will be seen as spam most places regardless of big tech influence. A bit of searching finds a couple posts about Neeva on big subreddits, which typically didn't get any traction[0]. Of course, the conspiratorial answer is that reddit lies about votes to suppress things it doesn't like, but I have seen no reason to believe that.

My Mastodon server has seen six posts mentioning it since September 2022. Most of them are tagging Leo Laporte, a well-known tech journalist presumably trying to get him to talk about it. He did[1], but apparently not enough to generate much buzz.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10diym9/neevaai...

[1] https://www.twit.community/t/twig-707-heartlessness-as-a-ser...

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#152

Post by freediver »

freedomben wrote: post #43

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…

From what is publicly available they at one point had 1M users and only 20k paid customers, so roughly a 2% free to paid conversion rate. So it appears that acquiring users was not an issue, acquiring customers was.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#153

Post by AndrewKemendo »

freediver wrote: post #148
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #138

I’m a paying Neeva user and I was extremely surprised to see that they’re shutting down after less than a year in operation. I’ve been extremely happy with it as my switch from google so now I’m left wanting. Thanks free market

> I’ve been extremely happy with it as my switch from google so now I’m left wanting. I am curious have you given Kagi a chance?

I have and liked what it was, but I really liked the GPT summary at the top of Neeva.

I'll look again at Kagi

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#154

Post by ignoramous »

repeekad wrote: post #70
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.

> ...then AI which they had zero hope in winning.

This announcement is more along the lines of, we'd rather sell AI-based products to enterprises than to consumers?

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#155

Post by pr337h4m »

jimsimmons wrote: post #17
bobosha wrote: post #5

Sorry to see you go, was rooting for you guys. A telling insight from Sridhar's email: "Contrary to popular belief, convincing someone 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."

They went for the Google++ model. That isn’t enough to cause a switch. You need Google x 10 or 100 to unseat the beast. I’m very glad they tried though. Gives us hackers hope that building a Google quality index outside of Google is not unimaginable

You'd like search.marginalia.nu. 100 million page index, on a single machine in the creator's living room, very interesting results that are super hard to find on Google/Bing (like https://hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/archive/Interviews/Systems/Elo...)

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#156

Post by ignoramous »

mmaunder wrote: post #64

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…

> What is intuitive is a human asking a computer for outcomes in plain English.

That's Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Apple HomeKit? Microsoft sunset Cortana not that long ago.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#157

Post by anenefan »

mg wrote: post #51
impulser_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is already building domain specific LLMs. They have Med-PaLM for medical, and Sec-PaLM for security.

Well, there have been operating systems before Linux and encyclopedias before Wikipedia.

Linux was out in 1991 ... Google was a late comer in 1998 and which for many years other search engines, both in general and perhaps more in the field I did a lot of web searching, returned much better results. Google eventually began to perform much better returning a slightly more good results iirc around 2002 and then further improving results ... also as M$ and a few other players having specialist string search engines banned from the web, (if anyone recalls M$ being upset people could search for some of their code being leaked ... ) google was the next best alternative though incredibly limited to do the same.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#158

Post by ignoramous »

kartayyar wrote: post #136

I tried Neeva, and the quality of results was just not there. Would have been happy to pay. "It is one thing to build a search engine, and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better choice." This line in post doesn't seem intellectually honest about why I think Neeva failed: it was never a 10X better experience. e.g. ChatGPT isn't complaining about acquiring users. I belie…

> ...it was never a 10X better experience.

True that new products need to be substantially better than the market leader to thrive (I particularly like this write up on the topic: Delta 4 theory of successful startups https://archive.is/WK96N ).

And Neeva might have been targeting a different, narrow niche (https://archive.is/ScazW) for which the product was 10x better?

> e.g. ChatGPT isn't complaining about acquiring users.

ChatGPT wasn't built to kill web search, but rather a super-capable, web-based conversation bot? Funny how that had Google on code red. Reminds me of, Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba: The right and the wrong way to compete with a locked market: https://archive.is/rY3NR

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#159

Post by scroot »

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…

Pulling hard for kagi. Great services are worth paying for. Loving my family plan!

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#160

Post by nugget »

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?

Toolbar, Chrome, other software partnerships and many enterprise search deals besides Firefox and Safari.
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