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Neeva Announces Public Availability of Its Ads Free, Private Search Engine

neeva.com

41–50 of 100 posts

Re: Neeva Announces Public Availability of Its Ads Free, Private Search Engine

#41

Looks like they're doing some sort of geo-filtering. I wasn't able to sign up from Canada.

Same. I rarely give out my email address for a waitlist, but the "Prefer More" screenshot showing that you can influence the rank of individual sites is a feature I've wanted in search for ages. There are so many sites I'd like to delete from the internet when I search with Google / Bing.

Re: Neeva Announces Public Availability of Its Ads Free, Private Search Engine

#43

I have been using Neeva for several weeks. It took a while to stop my eyes from scanning past "the fold" in search results. The useful stuff is right there at the top. I can't say enough good about my experience thus far. I had a concern about search latency, so I emailed Sridhar at ceo@neeva.co and he replied in a few hours. We had a nice chat via email. Now I have a mug and a T-shirt. I'm looking forward to paying…

> Would happily pay $20/mo -- this is worth more to me than subscriptions like Netflix.

I think I am on board with this thinking! The value provided by effective search is HUGE, way more than me binging on Netflix!

Re: Neeva Announces Public Availability of Its Ads Free, Private Search Engine

#44
I am always excited to hear about disruption in search. I would absolutely pay for a private search engine provided the results are useful!

But how can I be confident that neeva will not misuse my data? If I hook up my accounts to this service, I’ve gotta trust neeva with all the same information that google would have.

Is it possible to provide search functionality with only open source client side logic? This is in regards to the gmail, GitHub, slack integration. Now that would grab my attention!

Re: Neeva Announces Public Availability of Its Ads Free, Private Search Engine

#45

Is this a case of "it takes a thief to catch one"? Because looking at who is behind this, they seem to have more experience in abusing (rather than protecting) privacy and user rights. https://neeva.com/about

Can you expand on this?

I expect nickserv was talking about all the Googlers in the founders and investors lists. But this bit in particular really jumped out at me, for a company making a big deal about its add-free purity:

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

I can't help but wonder what clause there might be in the user contract (with teeth) that would prevent a future pivot or buyout or redefinition of the "Digital Bill of Rights" after all that juicy user data has been collected.

Re: Neeva Announces Public Availability of Its Ads Free, Private Search Engine

#46

Is this a case of "it takes a thief to catch one"? Because looking at who is behind this, they seem to have more experience in abusing (rather than protecting) privacy and user rights. https://neeva.com/about

Can you expand on this?

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

Re: Neeva Announces Public Availability of Its Ads Free, Private Search Engine

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neeva is trying to do better than Bing. Also, Neeva does not do ads.

Another interesting difference (that I personally find to be one of the best features in Neeva) is the ability to connect apps. You can then search not only the public web, but also private data from your Slack, Github, Gdrive, Jira (etc) accounts. We're hard at work adding more integrations in the near future as well. Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Neeva

Is there plans for students? (I guess you might not have any inputs on the pricing model)

Students (especially CSstudents) being exposed to this ahead will probably help them in and these are the kind of demographics that would pay for a search engine.

Re: Neeva Announces Public Availability of Its Ads Free, Private Search Engine

#48
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about that but they do have their own crawler so they're at least trying not to rely on Bing (if they do at all). https://neeva.com/neevabot

Last year when they announced they said they were using Bing: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/technology/google-neeva-e...

they have their own cralwers too

Re: Neeva Announces Public Availability of Its Ads Free, Private Search Engine

#49

Looks like they're doing some sort of geo-filtering. I wasn't able to sign up from Canada.

Same here in Europe. That's probably a good thing for them as it looks very US focused for now (as many products are), so providing a lesser service to users outside their currently active markets prevents bad user experience & bad reviews. I won't hold my breath waiting for it to hit Scandinavia.

Re: Neeva Announces Public Availability of Its Ads Free, Private Search Engine

#50
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about that but they do have their own crawler so they're at least trying not to rely on Bing (if they do at all). https://neeva.com/neevabot

Last year when they announced they said they were using Bing: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/technology/google-neeva-e...

Also from last year: "rather than try to build a search infrastructure from scratch, Neeva instead opted to use Bing's search API for its basic result"[0]. I thought that was a huge missed opportunity because you could build a pretty good search index of your own from scratch with $77.5M[1] in funding. But it wasn't clear if that was their plan for the long term.

[0] https://www.protocol.com/neeva-search

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/neeva

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