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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

#271

Post by MichaelZuo »

mi_lk wrote: post #203
usaar333 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Neeva failed because they didn’t understand distribution No, the team and its VCs fully understood distribution. Neeva never got to the point of having a compelling enough product where cost of user aq was below LTV for a large enough market.

Yea, distribution > product (most of the time) is almost startup 101 these days. It's dismissive to think the team and its big-name VCs behind it don't know the importance of distribution

Wasn't Stripe mostly word-of-mouth, with quite little money spent, until recently?

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#272

Post by MichaelZuo »

achenet wrote: post #249
freediver wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-s…

> 25 million people who pay for Youtube Premium today. and there are 2.5 billion monthly active users on Youtube, according to [0]. So about 1% of the userbase are willing to pay for ad-free content. [0] https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statis...

1% of 5 billion google users is 50 million users.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#273

Post by MichaelZuo »

oars wrote: post #226
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

Also, Neeva was founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at YouTube).

Surprised these folks would choose to buy results from Bing at all. They certainly would know people capable of building an actual index of the web.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#274

Post by MichaelZuo »

nine_k wrote: post #57
mg wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Britannica is still in a relatively high regard, and I heard that Windows and iOS are not entirely marginal. There may be room for more than one good LLM, especially in niche areas of knowledge.

Maybe, but that'll be B2B, just like how most of the niche 'competitors' to Wikipedia are now.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#275

Post by MichaelZuo »

pembrook wrote: post #224
internetter wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Outside of the HN crowd, I don't think the average consumer thinks of privacy as a differentiator. 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.

This is the issue with trying to derive market insights from an upvote based community. Unfortunately, people do not say what they truly think when internet points (formal sanctions in the sociological sense) are at stake. They instead bend their commenting to align with the performative moralistic aspirations of the most extreme members of the group. Here it presents as an almost hysterical level of privacy absoluti…

I think it's possible to avoid, at least if you have the determination.

For example, I chose a real name account intentionally partly because I was afraid that a pseudonym might encourage me to just go on typing nonsense that most intelligent folks could see through, yet avoid pointing out due to game theoretical reasons.

Sometimes it's extremely advantageous because I occasionally find myself the only HN user actually engaging in a substantive discussion in decently upvoted posts. Where literally ever other comment or comment chain in the post is either not replied to or consists of just folks writing platitudes one after another, even when the initial comment is substantive.

Sometimes I get extra lucky and some challenger appears trying to knock the arguments down a peg, which provides convenient tests of veracity.

But this does require staking some real world credibility to get that boost in willingness in others to engage substantively.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#276

Post by behringer »

wellthisisgreat wrote: post #265
behringer wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the early pricing is, but the current pricing is a bit absurd. I can't even consider it as a viable option.

hmm it comes down to $10/ month for me + 1-2$ in case of very intense searching

Even that seems a bit high but at least manageable

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#277

Post by gremlinsinc »

marymkearney wrote: post #179
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 happy Neeva user and I'll miss it. I even liked the media bias feature. Tried a Google search yesterday and it was ridiculously pointless. I'm looking forward to trying your product.

Curious, how did neeva stack up against phind.com? also kagi if anyone wants to chime in. I'm loving phind, I stan for them so much I should be on payroll lol.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#278

Post by version_five »

version_five wrote: post #268
_benj wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 pay for Kagi, I had a few minutes of minor outrage when I saw the pricing changes, which in retrospect was childish (for me, others motivations may differ). Iirc, the pricing actually won't change for me given the number of queri…

Also re the GP mention of caching, I'm sure I read in a discussion that kagi had tried that and it didn't change the economics.

For me, ~50% of searches are just lazy ways to get to a website I know, like I literally search for hacker news regularly. I'm curious if there's some kind of triage possible, where the lazy site lookups get a simple search that's cost efficient and then fail over to a costly search if they don't find anything. If there isn't something like this ready. Modern search is really just a "portal" with fuzzy matching for most queries, as opposed to genuine "show me a site I don't already know about" and I've never seen that reflected in any discussion about search.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#279

Post by shortformblog »

whimsicalism wrote: post #214
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.

Well, you can disagree all you want, but the truth is, factors like these help make Google feel more complete to people doing their searches. It’s an inertia play.

Google put the hard work into a large chunk of the literary output of the English language. No other search engine has this. If the goal of a search engine is to be the best at what it does, having hundreds of years of books and magazines is an excellent way to do it.

These books, and the riches they carry, inevitably lead writers like myself to link back to Google, which creates a feedback loop for content that is directly valuable to Google, because it pulls users back to the search engine.

I’m sorry you have such a limited view of Google’s best resource.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#280

Post by dragonwriter »

whimsicalism wrote: post #214
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.

> I doubt that this is a factor at all to the typical monetizable user. reply

The typical monetizable user, insofar as they exist, is what Google captures by default placement (whether what they purchase, or just from dominating the desktop browser space).

Features are how they remain sticky for various subgroups of atypical monetizable users.

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