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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

#211

Post by stOneskull »

_benj wrote: post #174
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…

I’m a very happy Kagi user, the search results are way better (subjective, I know) for me, that is, I can usually find what I’m looking for in the first few entries. I’m under the early adopter pricing but I fear that the higher price (and cognitive effort in lower prices to keep track of how many searches I’ve made) might make adoption a bit harder. I really really really don’t want Kagi to go away! I’ve shared with…

what if they had a free plan that allowed 100 searches each month. or extend the trial each month if requested. maybe it'd take many users more than a month to get into it and see the value in investing in a paid plan.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#212

Post by stOneskull »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #89
jimsimmons wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Anecdotally, after the first wave of excitement I don’t know anyone who still uses Bing chat. The value add in chat-augmented search isn’t huge IMO, and forcing the use of Edge doesn’t help.

it works a lot better than bing search at least

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#213

Post by jweir »

wincy wrote: post #103
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.

What was the media bias thing? Can you describe it in more detail? What was silly about it?

You could search news and have an option to select if you wanted your results more right wing or left wing.

It was a show off feature that solved a problem I’m not sure anyone needed solving. And I doubt it was cheap to create.

This alone didn’t raise an eyebrow but looking back now I see it as a misdirection.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#214

Post by whimsicalism »

shortformblog wrote: post #41

I feel bad this is how the journey ended for Neeva. I will say the big challenge for any competitor to Google from my point of view is that nobody else has as compelling of a search-based news product, and likewise the size of Google’s moat from Google Books is going to be a massive lift for any company to compete with. I am a special case because I do a lot of research. Not having anything close to Google Books has…

If you saying that Google books is a major factor/contributor in driving traffic to Google vs. other engines (ie. moat), I disagree. I doubt that this is a factor at all to the typical monetizable user.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#215

Post by alexruf »

freediver wrote: post #187
kovac wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, I looked at Kagi and found it too expensive. I'm a paying user for many software I use: vpn, email, git to list a few. And i am willing to pay a reasonable price for a search service. To put it in to perspective, my vpn costs less than $9 a month and I use it for high speed multimedia streaming, video games with no limits on usage. I hope you can come up with more reasonable pricing plans or consider open-sour…

We are trying to find a way to return to $10/mo unlimited searches. It is not for the lack of trying that we are not there already and we are trying to ensure Kagi's long term sustainability. Very grateful to all our customers supporting us in this period.

$10/mo for unlimited searches would be great. I recently subscribed to Kagi. So unlucky I don’t have the early adopters benefit. Kagi is a great product. But constantly having to think about my included amount of searches and making the the decision whether to use Kagi or a free search engine is making it kind of impractical to me. As long as there is the need to constantly switch between two search engines, I can no longer justify the high price for Kagi.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#216

Post by 5- »

kovac wrote: post #167
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…

Hello, I looked at Kagi and found it too expensive. I'm a paying user for many software I use: vpn, email, git to list a few. And i am willing to pay a reasonable price for a search service. To put it in to perspective, my vpn costs less than $9 a month and I use it for high speed multimedia streaming, video games with no limits on usage. I hope you can come up with more reasonable pricing plans or consider open-sour…

just a nitpick: none of what you list is software, it's all services (by 'git' i assume you mean git hosting, git itself is free)

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#217

Post by akdor1154 »

hgsgm wrote: post #170
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 surprised that a court-proven antitrust violator Microsoft would speak so openly about abusing it's dominant position in a different business to finance dumping a different product at low price to destroy a competitor.

I was surprised as well for the same reason.. but then I thought about how Google has directly attacked Office, Windows, and Windows Mobile in a pretty similar way.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#218

Post by marginalia_nu »

mg wrote: post #29

throughout this journey, we’ve discovered that 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 On the other hand, ChatGPT is the fastest growing product in human history. Because it beats Google for many types of searches. A friend of mine recently said that a good old Google search now feels like having to go to the library.…

I think we should stop talking about search engines (meaning "a google") as a single service, since it really isn't, but rather a series of more or less interconnected services. The notion of Internet Search is too nebulous to be able to have meaningful discussions about it.

It's much more enlightening to talk about which demand is being satisfied.

Google satisfies several disparate demands, including:

* Internet discovery

* Product discovery

* E-commerce discovery

* Brick&mortar commerce discovery

* Geographical discovery

* Fact discovery (question-answering)

All of these services have very little friction. Having a single interface helps with that, but I don't think it's a necessity. Low friction is though. Nobody wants to sign up for a service to get what google gives away ostensibly without that hassle.

It does most of these things decently well, largely thanks to being able to profile its users accurately. I don't think a competitor will replace Google by trying to copy their model and do all these things. Google is far too entrenched.

There's really no reason why you would need to compete against the combined offering of Google.

At several of these tasks, it's quite possible to outperform them. Especially in commercial discovery, there really aren't any good offerings right now. Finding the best something for the price range is frustrating, time consuming and annoying.

An LLM-based question-answering mostly satisfies the fact discovery need, not so much the others. This is of course fine, but it's important to understand that Google's killer functionality has never been answering questions, it's never been very good at that task.

Arguably, the seamless localization of the results is a much more important aspect.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#219

Post by sshine »

easytiger wrote: post #197
bruce511 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, there aren't limits. You pay 1.5c per search. You can choose a level to get some bulk-search rates. Which thus leads to a value proposition for you. Would you pay 1.5c to have this search Ad free? Personally I think the pricing model is presented incorrectly - it would be better to charge per search, with say a $5 minimum and a $25 maximum.

> Which thus leads to a value proposition for you. Would you pay 1.5c to have this search Ad free? Why does it matter when 95% of the links you click on those results will carry a dozen adverts? You are paying for a minor level of practical self righteousness

It matters to me because I believe the results are organically rated, i.e. nobody paid my search provider directly for top results.

With Google you become used to skip the first paid results that visually differ every so slightly — so much so that less technically inclined people, when I observe them, will click the paid results not knowing the difference.

I believe that, currently, Kagi is not building a profile of me based on my searches.

Basically, if I’m searching for something, and I’m not looking to buy something, the search is a lot more honest and a lot less stressful.

Ads on other sites can be adblocked, this is orthogonal; you can block ads on Google, but I just don’t trust that the algorithms are in my best interest, because I didn’t pay for anything.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#220

Post by onetokeoverthe »

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…

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