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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

#291

Post by mbrochh »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #231
omegant wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been unusable for some years. Limited results, capped searches… such a difference with the original Google, it’s just a ghost of what it used to be. I’m definitely going to give Kagi a try, I hope you are not restricting results by politics or so. I’m paying for Chat gpt at the moment but I still need to just search and not to be spoon fed curated results all the time… the moment they include payed adverti…

I've been using Google professionally for 10 years and 10 more before that as a hobbyist, and there has not been a degradation of the results. Every single time I have had someone claim that, and they then shared their search methodology, it became extremely obvious that the problem is between the keyboard and the chair, not in the search engine.

I don't think your argument holds.

When people experience search degradation (which I definitely do), they experience that while using the product EXACTLY like they did for years. Why else would they experience the degradation. It is most striking when something that used to work suddenly doesn't work any more.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#294

Post by anenefan »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #231
omegant wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been unusable for some years. Limited results, capped searches… such a difference with the original Google, it’s just a ghost of what it used to be. I’m definitely going to give Kagi a try, I hope you are not restricting results by politics or so. I’m paying for Chat gpt at the moment but I still need to just search and not to be spoon fed curated results all the time… the moment they include payed adverti…

I've been using Google professionally for 10 years and 10 more before that as a hobbyist, and there has not been a degradation of the results. Every single time I have had someone claim that, and they then shared their search methodology, it became extremely obvious that the problem is between the keyboard and the chair, not in the search engine.

If one was a professional researcher and relied on the various search switches [1] for nearly every search conducted, one would have found unequivocally that google's search ability has seriously declined some number of years ago. Google's present search is an insult to what it once was. It's presently perhaps a good fit for grasping, or easy to find data.

Also, additionally even with a focused search back pre 2010-12, I being thorough, often found myself 700 to 800 entries in search result, selectively opening about 10 or more sites to investigate further for a broad all encompassing search. Present time I'm lucky to get three results that are not ads, and no second or third page of 10 results per page. Google is clearly playing the numbers game.

[1] https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#295

Post by mardifoufs »

smcin wrote: post #293

Any ballpark estimates how many paid subscribers Neeva and Kagi each have?

Probably not accurate anymore but they published a blog post about their first three months (it hasn't been a year yet!) after their official release. It was free during the beta before then.

https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months

Seems like they were at 2600 paid subscribers, but the wording indicates that they were seeing a pretty solid growth rate.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#296

Post by carlosjobim »

version_five wrote: post #278
version_five wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 see many people writing the same. What is the explanation? Do you not use browser history or do you use a browser that don't suggest URLs?

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#297

Post by carlosjobim »

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…

The pricing for Kagi is reasonable, even cheap. I think you're doing the mistake of comparing a normally priced product with a great bargain product like your VPN.

Just because two things are on the computer doesn't mean their prices are comparable. Go to a bar and get a drink for $9 and you won't raise an eyebrow at the price, even though your VPN is immensely more useful to you. If you pay for parking downtown you won't write a comment on HN about it, even though you pay the same price for a couple of hours of parking as you pay for watching Netflix every evening the whole month. You get a meal in a restaurant for the same price as you pay for bed sheets that you use for hundreds or even thousands of hours.

Kagi is very reasonably priced for the quality of life increase the better search results give.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#298

Post by carlosjobim »

giantrobot wrote: post #208
bruce511 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a Kagi user (yet) but I think you're missing the point. In order to display just one ad, the engine has to start tracking you. The converse, just display a random ad, is not valuable to advertizers and they won't pay for it. Equally, the kagi user base is so small that even if I -wanted- to put an ad on Kagi, I'd get very few impressions per month. Lastly given that the user base is self-selecting as a group…

> In order to display just one ad, the engine has to start tracking you. They most certainly do not. Ads can be contextual for the search like AdWords was. Instead of selling their users they could sell their content.

At least you'd want to track user language. There are many words that are spelled the same in different languages but have completely different meanings. Just one example.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#299

Post by smcin »

mardifoufs wrote: post #295
smcin wrote: post #293

Any ballpark estimates how many paid subscribers Neeva and Kagi each have?

Probably not accurate anymore but they published a blog post about their first three months (it hasn't been a year yet!) after their official release. It was free during the beta before then. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months Seems like they were at 2600 paid subscribers, but the wording indicates that they were seeing a pretty solid growth rate.

Sure but sounds like they also had high churn (free and paid). Lots of people will give an interesting-sounding new product a try, but then bounce if it doesn't meet their expectations.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#300

Post by nunez »

freediver wrote: post #117
AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-s…

Never have I seen someone so succinctly articulate what the fuck went wrong with the Web.

Seeing social media, for example, go from "fun way to catch up with friends and family" to "pump ads, FUD and FOMO to our users as efficiently and accurately as possible, 24x7x365" has been an incredibly sad experience.

Seeing Google go from "I can type a question and find what I'm looking for" to "I have to append site:reddit.com to every query to avoid SEO-optimized puff pieces because Google can't be trusted" is disheartening.

I really hate having to be so overly aggressive in blocking ads and trackers on my devices because collecting this telemetry is the only way for many Internet companies to survive these days.

It doesn't help that talking about this with non-Internet-savvy people who were hoodwinked into the status quo makes me sound like a stereotypical doomsday cult subscriber.

I really hope the rest of the world agrees with the future you're describing here, Vlad.

Thank you so much for writing this. I'm proud to help support your mission in fixing the Internet.

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