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

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

#81

Post by dannywarner »

navyeet wrote: post #80
dannywarner wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fair question whether the architects of Google's ad monopoly are the right people to build a private search engine. As noted in the comments here, Neeva's own website says "Neeva was founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at YouTube)." Anyone who reads the NYT or Information articles can draw their own conclusions. If the counter-example you quote is…

Read what I said again, and then re-read in just in case you didn't get it that second time. Also my account was created 2 years ago.

No, your statement is not correct. I can see your account was created on May 15, 2020 and that you have no other comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nbabra.

The OP account that posted the link was nmwnmw. It was created on May 23, 2020. It has 2 submissions (both Neeva) and no comment history, at https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nmwnmw

It seems likely you work for Neeva. You should address these points as a Neeva representative if so. I'd be totally stoked to engage in constructive discussion about this, because it is actually an incredibly important issue.

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

#82

Post by Zachsa999 »

zorrolovsky wrote: post #55

I agree with others that a new business model for search is refreshing. But... for a privacy-oriented service, Neeva is doing a poor job in earning my trust. I spent some minutes in their website and all I could find are vague promises and grandiose marketing-speak. Where's the evidence and the technical detail? Where are the privacy experts, data experts and engineers impressing me with the robustness, openness and…

I digress. I thought this was a good idea, a good product at the outset. I hate scrolling through all the ads etc.

However. After reading the comments I decided to keep my wallet in my pocket. Is this good enough, was I supposed to think up the skepticism when I discovered the product?

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

#83

Post by judge2020 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #72
judge2020 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those ads are so bad Google makes money from people paying to remove them. Arguably those ads have to be that annoying if people want to use YouTube for free, at least in its current state - it’s a globally free service that receives 500 hours of content every minute[0]. Less annoying ads drive less clicks and thus generate less revenue. Paying to remove them is a sign that you actually value YT for how much it cos…

I don't value YT for how much it costs to run I value it for the videos that people choose to upload for free. I am not sure that it matters much to me that I am downloading videos from an enormous site with massive traffic. Some of the best videos I get from YT have very few views and the uploaders are not looking to financially profit from sharing them. These videos could easily be served from smaller sites with le…

I don’t disagree with you but there’s a reason those creators chose YouTube and aren’t purchasing video hosting for $x/mo and linking people to their website - YT provides free uploading and discovery to everyone, so those creators are available to you just as a million other small creators are available to all 2+ billion YouTube viewers who have their own niches and interests. YouTube’s free-ness and discovery is only possible at this scale, with ads (and the subset of users who convert to paying customers via those ads or purchase YT premium) subsidizing the rest of us with our OSS ad blockers turned on. If google can’t continue to get people to pay for YT premium or show ads that lead to conversions, they won’t turn a profit and won’t be able to provide this global service in its current form.

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

#84

Post by proxyforce »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #47
proxyforce wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's great feedback and I'll pass it along to our product management team. Thank you!

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

#86

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

judge2020 wrote: post #83
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't value YT for how much it costs to run I value it for the videos that people choose to upload for free. I am not sure that it matters much to me that I am downloading videos from an enormous site with massive traffic. Some of the best videos I get from YT have very few views and the uploaders are not looking to financially profit from sharing them. These videos could easily be served from smaller sites with le…

I don’t disagree with you but there’s a reason those creators chose YouTube and aren’t purchasing video hosting for $x/mo and linking people to their website - YT provides free uploading and discovery to everyone, so those creators are available to you just as a million other small creators are available to all 2+ billion YouTube viewers who have their own niches and interests. YouTube’s free-ness and discovery is on…

"... us with our OSS ad blockers turned on."

That's great, but personally I do not use an ad blocker because I do not need to use a browser to search, download or watch video. Nor do I need python or youtube-dl. I download videos with something like

   curl -4o 1.mp4 $(curl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1234567890a|sed  "s/\\u0026/\&/g"|grep  -o "https://r[0-9]\{1,2\}--[^\"]*"|sed -n /itag=22/p)
except I do not use curl.

I play videos with ffmpeg-based players. I do not need to be online to play video.

Tech companies that rely on advertising to generate revenue (and thus need "scale") want others to believe advertising is necessary for there to be free stuff shared via the internet.

I know that's not true because I have been downloading free stuff via the internet, including video, since before YouTube or Google existed. I also know that peer-to-peer is the most efficient way to share stuff, not server-client. Middlemen selling ads are not necessary.

People are going to share stuff for free as long as the internet exists, regardless of whether Google or anyone makes money from advertising. That's what makes the internet interesting, not middlemen like Google or people using the internet for commercial gain.

"That's all I know."

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

#87

Post by zorrolovsky »

Zachsa999 wrote: post #82
zorrolovsky wrote: post #55

I agree with others that a new business model for search is refreshing. But... for a privacy-oriented service, Neeva is doing a poor job in earning my trust. I spent some minutes in their website and all I could find are vague promises and grandiose marketing-speak. Where's the evidence and the technical detail? Where are the privacy experts, data experts and engineers impressing me with the robustness, openness and…

I digress. I thought this was a good idea, a good product at the outset. I hate scrolling through all the ads etc. However. After reading the comments I decided to keep my wallet in my pocket. Is this good enough, was I supposed to think up the skepticism when I discovered the product?

> was I supposed to think up the skepticism when I discovered the product?

It's always good to be a bit skeptic. But please don't put too much pressure on yourself.

The reason why I see red flags is because I spent a lot of time learning about what makes a good privacy product and created my own framework to evaluate services. But most people don't have the time to do that, and need to trust what they're being told.

In other words, I don't think the problem is your lack of skepticism or technical knowledge about privacy. That's perfectly reasonable and normal. The problem is that companies blatantly lie, exploit users and do shady businesses, and they get away with it with repugnant impunity. If they were sevely punished and scrutinized when they do shady business of feed lies to people we would have a more trustable ecosystem.

In my ideal world, when a company like Neeva launches with such grandiose statements, they would get analyzed and scrutinized by experts, who will publish findings in a simple English format. If their statements were incorrect, they would be held accountable and punished. For example they would have to remove the 'privacy-oriented' crap from their website and just position themselves as another search engine.

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

#88

Post by zorrolovsky »

killingtime74 wrote: post #79
zorrolovsky wrote: post #55

I agree with others that a new business model for search is refreshing. But... for a privacy-oriented service, Neeva is doing a poor job in earning my trust. I spent some minutes in their website and all I could find are vague promises and grandiose marketing-speak. Where's the evidence and the technical detail? Where are the privacy experts, data experts and engineers impressing me with the robustness, openness and…

We live in a post evidence world

Very interesting comment! Any ideas on what are we supposed to do in this world? I keep on thinking we need to take a step back, come back to evidence and logic and make things right. But deep inside I know that's not going to happen. In the post-evidence world, it's too easy for people without moral to grab power and benefit. That is, it makes it easier for those in power to grab more power. That's why things will remain the same for a while.

Is the solution to simply smile and carry on? Is it time for a (non-violent) revolution?

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

#89

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

Animats wrote: post #85

According to the Forbes article, this isn't a real search engine. It's just a reseller wrapper around Bing, like Yahoo Search. I thought they were really doing a search engine of their own, but no.

A real search engine costs billions in hardware costs alone.

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

#90

Post by londons_explore »

Neevabot seems to deliberately 'misunderstand' robots txt files excluding it:

https://neeva.com/neevabot

They go crawling anywhere googlebot is allowed...

As a webmaster who explicitly allowed only Googlebot, I'm pretty annoyed to find another companies bot crawling my site too, doubling the server load (crawling consists of about 30% of my compute budget for Googlebot alone - it turns out bots have far worse cache hit rates than real users). This 'dishonest' behaviour of Neeva has cost me ~$2000 so far... Will they be refunding me that from all their subscriptions?

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