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Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

blog.vespa.ai

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Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#51

Post by nashashmi »

slimsag wrote: post #16
throwaway280383 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ex-yahoo here (Quit in 2022, at the height of salary boom :) Yahoo is a profitable company with atleast 5B $ in revenue. Search and Mail are extremely profitable businesses. When was the last time you changed your mail id? Search is atleast 2B $ plus in revenue. Mail is 1B $ plus in revenue. Yahoo Finance, Yahoo sports, yahoo news are all highly trafficked websites although I dont know the revenue numbers. I do wager…

Wow, search.yahoo.com actually looks kind of nice/snappy

It works without JS!

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#52

Post by jkb79 »

cfors wrote: post #27

Can anybody speak to how Vespa compares to some other Vector Database solutions? Seems like there's so many options today

Disclaimer, I work on Vespa.

If you look for just pure vector similarity search, there are many alternatives. But Vespa's tensor support, multi-vector indexing and the ability to express models like colBERT (1) or cross-encoders makes it stand out if you need to move beyond pure vector search support.

Plus, for RAG use cases, it's a full blown text search engine as well, allowing hybrid ranking combinations. Also with many pure vector databases like Pinecone, you cannot describe an object with more than one vector, if you have different vector models for the object, you need different indexes, and then duplicate metadata across those indexes (if you need filtering + vector search).

1 https://blog.vespa.ai/pretrained-transformer-language-models...

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#53

Post by matsemann »

neilk wrote: post #21

Vespa was actually very cool at the time as a document-oriented search engine, occupying the same niche as Solr and elaborations of that like ElasticSearch. But I don't know if it's competitive today. This blog post says it's "developed by Yahoo" which is I guess true. But it was originally an acquisition, largely developed by a team in Norway, and apparently most Vespa development still happens there.

Norway also had the FAST search company acquired by Microsoft. Is Norway particularly good at making search stuff?

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#54

Post by [deleted] »

dathinab wrote: post #31
neilk wrote: post #21

Vespa was actually very cool at the time as a document-oriented search engine, occupying the same niche as Solr and elaborations of that like ElasticSearch. But I don't know if it's competitive today. This blog post says it's "developed by Yahoo" which is I guess true. But it was originally an acquisition, largely developed by a team in Norway, and apparently most Vespa development still happens there.

> don't know if it's competitive today very, it's outcompeting most vector databases on features and maturity when it comes to vector search while having very powerful and flexible and proven text search too The tricky part is, it's more a platform to build complex search systems with then "just" a vector database. So if a found a company today which focus is to create clever multi phase search pipelines and train (e…

[deleted]

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#56

Post by simfree »

throwaway280383 wrote: post #50
parthdesai wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When was the last time you changed your mail id? I get this sentiment, but I don't know anyone in my age group (late 20s/early 30s) that use yahoo mail either. My dad did use yahoo mail, but i'm guessing it has about 20 years left.

Most growth currently is international. Remember, gmail doesn't work in China :)

Which Yahoo services work in China?

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#57

Post by chinchilla2020 »

throwaway280383 wrote: post #14
SpaceNoodled wrote: post #4

So what exactly does Yahoo do these days?

Ex-yahoo here (Quit in 2022, at the height of salary boom :) Yahoo is a profitable company with atleast 5B $ in revenue. Search and Mail are extremely profitable businesses. When was the last time you changed your mail id? Search is atleast 2B $ plus in revenue. Mail is 1B $ plus in revenue. Yahoo Finance, Yahoo sports, yahoo news are all highly trafficked websites although I dont know the revenue numbers. I do wager…

Yahoo Finance is still the best

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#58

Post by ramses0 »

weare138 wrote: post #34
zitterbewegung wrote: post #20

What hasn’t spun out of Yahoo?

Yahoo could have been the next AWS if it hadn't been horribly mismanaged.

Maps. Groups. Upcoming/Local. Flickr. Tech was great, groundbreaking at the time (however, that had its own drag on velocity). Product "management" of anything post-acquisition was demonstrably atrocious.

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#59

Post by jkb79 »

daveevad wrote: post #55

Anyone able to share the definitive history of the polar bears that visited the office? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Polar_Be...

Hehe, it was a joke, we don't have polar bears on the mainland of Norway. But, it was fun to show the photo to visitors from different countries. "Be careful when you walk back to the hotel".
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