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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

#181

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.

Totally agree here and even though it was slow at times, the LLM summary and resulting links were always on point

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#182
post #168
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…

This is a bit off-topic, but sadly, I have to agree. I AM a paying Kagi user, but the new limits have hit me extremely hard. I'm now paying twice as much per month and still almost hitting my monthly limit. I really don't want Kagi to go away but I think they have to adjust their prices if they want to keep thier customers around, me included

Same here. I was a customer for a long time and loved the service, but having to watch my “search spend” and constantly going over limits is really annoying. I ended up cancelling but I really wish I didn’t.

Personally I’d like to see an ad-supported, or partially ad-supported version that isn’t evil.

The way Google started out with relevant ads in the sidebar or a single relevant ad at the top is acceptable in my opinion if it means bring the cost way down for the end user and ensuring sustainability for the company.

I don’t think asking users to shell out $10, $20, $30 per month for search is a viable long term model that’ll ever appeal to the masses.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#183

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…

Hey guys keep it up! I am one of your early supporter customers, and I haven’t used Google ever since I switched to Kagi sometime in 2022 The pay for use model for search is refreshing. I hope the economics work out

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.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#184
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see some people are downvoting my comment because it is suggesting an option that uses AI I'm not biased, i neither like or dislike AI or any other tech. Perplexity seems to use gpt-3 under the hood but i couldn't care less about that. What i care about is that it allows me to dig into and learn new subjects in a way that was not possible before. It's so much better than google, ddg etc that i do most of my "diggin…

We already have an experiment called FastGPT: https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt Also we have a ton of AI features in Kagi, they are just not 'in your face' but we have an AI integration philosophy that we are sticking to: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search

This ai self-censors excessively now, usually when public figures are concerned and refuses to do anything better than their overlong ai summarizer (paid). It is very fast at showing you what kagi wants you to see.

Goes to show that adfree/paid search engines (a.i. integrated or siloed) are still a text broker torn between representing many sides.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#185
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Interesting that this is their approach I think in time we will find not specialized llms but instead a single big one like chatgpt exposed is the winner because it allows for a faster and easier way to access information without knowing the domain ahead of time. When google came out in the late 90s we had to learn the right way to search and that became a skill… the advantage of natural language as the interface is…

Google's research on this says the opposite. Specialized LLM are better than general LLM in the area they are specialized in.

Which makes sense a primary care doctor is a good doctor but a specialist is going to be better in their specialized field.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#186

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...

Restaurants didn’t kill the supermarket. I still use Google, but sometimes I use ChatGPT where I may have used Google. But having said that we are still early. If ChatGPT gets access to current information and can quote sources, pull out pertinent parts of web pages, etc then I might stop using Google. That would be like a restaurant that lets you eat then leave with your weekly shop but at costco prices.

I feel like my Google searches are too short and precise in general; if I were to try getting the same information from an informal AI chat, it's a huge loss of productivity and efficiency I'd imagine.

Google: "" = Full page of information including reviews, links to order delivery, directions, etc. All in a standard UI that doesn't change from restaurant to restaurant. Muscle memory takes over.

ChatGPT: "Tell me about " = Blurb of text that may or may not be useful.

People, including myself, have asked Google a lot of straight-up questions over the years, and those use cases match well with generative AI. But the overall point of a search engine is to find something on the internet, and I don't think that's going to go away.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#187
post #167

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…

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.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#188
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are annoyed by ads, but really it is not that much of an annoyance. Neeva solves the smallest pain point ever exists.

Maybe for others, but I find them a huge annoyance, to the point that I am willingly paying Neeva, and looking for a new paid search engine. I did not ask for ads, and I can pay, so why should I suffer them? If I want to buy something, I will search for it. I would not welcome a salesman who interrupted my dinner with a voucher for my next meal; I'd give him a wedgie.

Most people who are annoyed by ads just use an ad blocker. I know there are people with ethical qualms about it, but "hates ads but has ethical aversion to blocking them" isn't a large enough market to support a VC-funded startup.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#189
post #27

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…

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…

> 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.

Re: We will be shutting down neeva.com

#190
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]. That sounds to me like they failed hard, both from a technical point of view and marketing-wise. (This is the first time I've heard of them.) Simply burning through lots of money is not an interesting factor. Edit: I tried it out: https://i.imgur.com/0YBorgG.png

One of the neeva co-founders claimed that they built their own real-time index from the get-go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34333817

> Neeva does rely on Bing for some web search activity, as evidenced by. However, it is pushing towards relying entirely on its own search stack.

https://neeva.com/massets/ask-neeva/does-neeva-use-bing.html

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