We will be shutting down neeva.com
neeva.com
neeva.com
As a founder of a startup in the same space (Kagi) we feel these challenges. We face difficult decisions every day. It is hard but I am cautiously optimistic about our approach. All I know is that when the dust settles in two years, we still plan to be around.
Big props to the Neeva team for educating the market about the existence of ad-free search and paving the way for bootstrapped companies like ours.
“From now on, the [gross margin] of search is going to drop forever,” Nadella said in an interview with the Financial Times.
“There is such margin in search, which for us is incremental. For Google it’s not, they have to defend it all,” he added, referring to the competition against Google as “asymmetric”.
https://www.ft.com/content/2d48d982-80b2-49f3-8a83-f5afef98e...
It's 50% of Google's revenue, and they'll suffer immensely if this goes away.
Because my understanding is that about 60% of Google's total revenue is search ads, and if you include network ads (which would be relevant since they are at risk from AI as well) then it is more like 70%.
Note buggy WHIP makers, not buggy makers.
whips to cars does not really compare. Cars to buggies would compare or perhaps whips to steering wheels.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/xjbpfo/oc_...
looks you are about right
Bing has failed to take away meaningful marketshare from Google by MSFT’s on admission
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-eyes-firef...
On the other hand, I am really happy with https://phind.com and find myself using it if I struggle to understand some concept.
For me, the power of the chat based apps is that I can explain my mental model and they can directly build upon that.
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.
Google: "<local restuarant>" = 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 <local restaurant>" = 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.
The question is to what extent this "something" is answers to questions or content that is only useful in its original format.
Briefly got a bit concerned with the recent billing tweaks but that's all worked out fine too.
Remember these prompts? https://www.thewindowsclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ch...
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.
Models are not trained during inference, are they?
Regardless, it seems like LLMs are going to have some role to play in search in the future. It's just not clear what that role is yet.
I sincerely hope that LLMs won’t play a role in search, I don’t need a search engine trying to infer what I “meant” to type, Google and DDG started doing that and pushed me to Kagi as a result. Just take the words I type verbatim and search them in your index, don’t assume this is my first time using the internet.
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 "digging" with it, like trying to build something new or debug an issue. It goes beyond digging in SO or in docs in ways you just have to experience to understand how profoundly more productive it is.
And I'd love to have more options. Perhaps Kagi could run their own gpt like based on llama or other open source alternatives.
To each their own, if you still want to stick with traditional search, I'm sure those will still be around
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:
“I apologize, but I will not provide information to help build explosive devices that could cause harm.”
Goes to show that adfree/paid search engines (a.i. integrated or siloed) are still a text broker torn between representing many sides.
The pay for use model for search is refreshing. I hope the economics work out
We will be at the end of the AI hype cycle we are currently in. Majority of AI/search startups that exist today will no longer be around, failing to find a viable business model that has a hope of profitability, as stuffing ads inside will put them in direct trajectory of Google/Microsoft's insane resources.
Google and Microsoft situation will be much better defined. One of these companies will discover that being a platform open to developers is a strategic advantage. Ad-supported search as a model will fail to find ground in AI answers. Both companies will inject so many ads in AI chat answers to pay for the bills, that AI answers will become so intelligence insulting that even users who previously didn't mind ads (or had ways to block them) will finally start looking for ad-free search alternatives. Some ad-supported results will start having 'for entertainment purposes only' label as they will start to carry unwanted liability otherwise.
This will finally allow large scale prolifiration of a new breed of search products offering search experiences made for users instead of advertisers. Paying for search will become much more common and we will be slowly exiting the 25 years Matrix-like coma situation we are currently held in, where the expectation for the most valuable and intimate thing we do online (search and browsing) is to be free, while we accept to surrender our private information, time and attention in return.
The alignment of incentives in combination with enough resources and the newest techonlgoies will finally allow for truly amazing innovation in search, changing the way we consume information forever.
At the same time, we will start to see signs of the first public search engines (goverment subsidized), inheriting the role that public libraries had for centuries, as access to information will be deemed as a fundamental human right.
So when I think about Kagi's trajectory, it is surviving the next two years and keeping on innovating that matters. The business model is already sound and future-proof (the price will come down too).
I have never seen a service/industry move from ads to subscription. People will watch as many ads as you throw at them to avoid paying.
For example, even though youtube keeps increasing ads to an annoying level, vast majority of public is willing to grovel through that rather than pay for it. What evidence do you have that makes you think that that will change?
Please don't get me wrong. I admire someone creating a new and different search engine but if you keep growing in size, I believe you will face the same pressures that google/bing/etc faced and go the same route they did. "The king is dead, long live the king" scenario.
PS : remember larry and sergey warned about advertising incentives in their research paper as well but once you see the 9-10-11-12 digit figures on a piece of paper, idealistic morality usually goes out the window.
Ofc this is just my "educated guess at best, speculation at worst". I have a lot less information than you in this field.
And ad-free search products like the one Kagi is building are able to offer much more value and features than their ad-supported counterparts (which are inherinetly restricted by the nature of the business model and their customer being different than their user).
To be clear, I do not think that in two or even five years paid search will rule the world in a way that ad-supported search does now, but I think that enough people will realize that access to information that has only their best interest in mind will make them more productive and competitive in the future world, and make paying for search a much more viable option than today.
Have more thoughts about this in "The age of pagerank is over" blog post if you want to spare a moment. [1]
and there are 2.5 billion monthly active users on Youtube, according to [0].
So about 1% of the userbase are willing to pay for ad-free content.
[0] https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statis...
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.
Even they are moving towards ad now.
No. The commenter you replied to is actually a time traveler sent back from 2025.
HERE BE SOMEONE WITH MONEY
iPhone users are a perfect example of this.
Generative content sprinkled here and there but majority of results still being genuine human created content.
I don’t see MSFT being a player here. Their ML talent is shallow, their search team is tiny compared to Google and a partnership with a startup won’t change that
I think AI is overhyped right now. Very few real businesses being built on GPT outside of copywriting and blog spam, and consumer toys (avatars, art, funny filters).
I also think Google knows it’s not as disruptive as people think it is.
It will help you surface information faster.
in 2 years i will just run local llm and not touch google/microsoft models with a ten foot pole
the internet will be full of generated garbage and rendered useless
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 advertisement in gpt results is going to feel like browsing in the Truman show.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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 paying money not to see ads, my ads will likely get no clicks.
Thus, imo, you can be subscription supported, or ad supported but not both.
I don't think so. Selling ads based on keywords in search terms has always been a viable strategy.
But you're right about Kagi's current user base. Selling yourself as an ad-free alternative and then introducing ads sounds difficult to say the least.
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.
Which thus leads to a value proposition for you. Would you pay 1.5c to have this search Ad free?
Personally I think the pricing model is presented incorrectly - it would be better to charge per search, with say a $5 minimum and a $25 maximum.
Why does it matter when 95% of the links you click on those results will carry a dozen adverts?
You are paying for a minor level of practical self righteousness
With Google you become used to skip the first paid results that visually differ every so slightly — so much so that less technically inclined people, when I observe them, will click the paid results not knowing the difference.
I believe that, currently, Kagi is not building a profile of me based on my searches.
Basically, if I’m searching for something, and I’m not looking to buy something, the search is a lot more honest and a lot less stressful.
Ads on other sites can be adblocked, this is orthogonal; you can block ads on Google, but I just don’t trust that the algorithms are in my best interest, because I didn’t pay for anything.
Then I find my result
That said. I have used Google less than 20x since subscribing to GPT4. AI killed Google for me and I've been using it for half my life.
The only place where Kagi is mostly worse is figuring out that the query is actually about a specific place and results should point to a map. At least for me.
Which makes sense. There are no Kagi maps. It might be interesting to leverage OSM.
It doesn't do that because that's impossible. If you search for something that's in the news, you visit the news site retrieved by the search engine. That has no bearing on the fact that site will, most likely, be heavily ad supported, most likely.
> organic sites get a boost.
Sorry but I can't infer any meaning from that fragment. What is an "organic site"?
If you’re talking about a niche topic with only one result you obviously still get that one result, but I’d argue for most search terms the issue lies in ordering the very many results.
Of course, I would pay 2c per search! Or even 5c. Or maybe even 10c!
But, no, I’m not going to pay a lump sum up front. And certainly not every month through a subscription.
There are good paywall options out there that don’t eat into your % and that are effortless to set up. The user on the paying end doesn’t have to make a profile with the payment processor, either.
For a proof of concept, just look at Yalls.
Just to be clear: I know Yalls runs on the bitcoin "Lightning Network." I am fully aware that many HN readers don't see the use case for bitcoin yet. It is my firm conviction, if micropayments had existed earlier in the development phase of the internet, we wouldn't be flooded by adds today.
The Lighting network allows for such payments, as little as a fraction of a dollar cent.
Users don't even need to know or see that in the background you're running your payment rails over bitcoin. A wallet like BBW can simply show you a dollar amount, and when paying, all the uses sees is that he paid a few dollar cents.
I think that the current obstinacy or refusal to use the micropayment tools that exist today are holding us back and are keeping the world firmly in the grasp of Big Advertising.
And I get it: the market if flooded by nonsense "crypto" coins or nonsense NFT projects, that are obvious scams or money grabs. Numerous early websites were plain nonsense, and plenty of people thought that because of that, the Internet would go nowhere. Some pushed through though and saw the bright future behind the clouds.
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.
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 really really really don’t want Kagi to go away! I’ve shared with some friends that are also using it and even though they also reacted to the price change, they decided to stay (just like me) because of the early adopters price.
This part is totally unsolicited advice, but I find my self searching quite often for the same thing, like, my browser will remember a search instead of the domain of the thing I’m searching for (i.e. wanna go to namecheap, my browser remembers the namecheap kagi search instead of namecheap.com), maybe there could be some space to optimize repeated searches? Idk, if I’ve made a search X times the just cache it and return me the same result, don’t count that towards the total, and add a little message that the results are cached and if I want to search again click there? I know I could make bookmarks but changing behaviors is a way taller ask than caching. Anyways, best of luck and I really really hope that kagi stays afloat!
When it comes to your point of repeated searches: I wish my search results would be a combination of global (unpersonalized) ranking and local personalized ranking. The global ranking would filter out spam and useless content but the final ordering of the results could be determined by a locally running algorithm that learns my preferences. For example when searching for Rust it could filter out all gaming related content and only present me the programming language related results.
Main one being all these spammy StackExchange mirrors and similar. A lot of ChatGPT-like blogspam that just seem to be pages to get people to go and buy something from Amazon too.
I only realized after reading your comment that I can block and boost results in Kagi and I will definitely start using that. I think I did injustice to Kagi in my previous comment, because it does more or less what I wished for without me noticing. (The fact that I pay for it makes it even more embarrassing;-)
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 queries I do, and regardless I'll probably just get the highest tier anyway and be done with it. There are always ad supported options for people who want to save money. Personally I prefer to pay what it costs (meaning pay so that kagi can run a viable business) because I know how advertising perverts a business. I hope they can succeed by appealing to people who think this way.
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 don't find anything. If there isn't something like this ready. Modern search is really just a "portal" with fuzzy matching for most queries, as opposed to genuine "show me a site I don't already know about" and I've never seen that reflected in any discussion about search.
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?
As Google replaces more and more of their knowledge-graph powered backend with instant "answers" and LLMs (something on-going since 2013 with the release of Hummingbird, with the integration of BERT, and now with Bard and the increasing pressure from stakeholders blinded by AI hype) which I think contributes more to the degradation of their platform there'll be an even clearer need and opportunity for a competitor in the space. Neeva was never going to be that team.
Ironically, if you're signed out of Google, it likely has better privacy than smaller, privacy-focused search engines because they have much tighter internal data and IT controls.
This is the first time I've heard of Neeva.
In fact, HN is a rara avis in that it allows "Show HN" posts
My Mastodon server has seen six posts mentioning it since September 2022. Most of them are tagging Leo Laporte, a well-known tech journalist presumably trying to get him to talk about it. He did[1], but apparently not enough to generate much buzz.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10diym9/neevaai...
[1] https://www.twit.community/t/twig-707-heartlessness-as-a-ser...
People would also usually post from multiple users whereas now it's all about tanking karma
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
Sometimes i wonder how much "business" is about getting gov. subsidies, grants or scamming the masses, then distributing wealth to friends and family horizontally to elite peers.
Amounts that seem absurd to billions of working class people disappear on the daily apparently with zero value ever created - i've seen this happen enough times IRL to realise that most business is part performance, part deception around very little actual core value, - businesstheater almost.
I've seen a lot of that crap on e.g. the Oslo Stock Exchange over the past two decades. Lots of money from local and very inexperienced (e.g. fishing/shipping/oil money) companies/people, looking to invest in tech and often randomly landing on investing in quite far out gambles where it's legitimitely really hard to figure out of there's an intent of fraud or not. The exec teams tend to draw disgustingly high comps though. Then the weird companies get insanely hyped for no reason by local "economy journalists". Then there's loads of insider leaks and trading. Oslo Stock Exchange is like the wild west.
I thought this was largely isolated to small immature markets like e.g. Norway though.
Why then reinvent the wheel and spend untold amount of resources re-crawling the web, when Bing will let you use theirs? What secret sauce for crawling web pages does doing your own crawl bring to the table?
(Yes, you also namedropped Pagerank for some odd reason.)
The thing is, though: You can't easily outsource the crawling and then do the quering/ranking inhouse. The reverse index and various other data structures you need are inherently tied to the data structures from the crawler output. This is a very large amount of data and it's changing often.
The outsourcing that is being done is at the "search query to results" level. That is why this is so disappointing.
Please, relax.
https://neeva.com/massets/ask-neeva/does-neeva-use-bing.html
Fair to say that people have tried. Hard. If feels unlikely that there will ever be another search engine. That product category is basically done.
There is obviously much excitement about the potentially disruptive role of LLM. Its a powerful alternative algorithmic interface to public information but both its tenuous relation with facts and ultimately it being based on the same adtech business model means the end-result might have to be massaged and be quite a bit less disruptive than what people think or hope.
It is hard to say where true disruption will come from. Its probably not going to be called "search" but it must make search obsolete.
I don't know how widespread that feeling might be, but I'm tired "searching". I don't want my interface to the world to be a daily grind defined by adtech optimizations. We need a new interface to information. More persistent, more tailored, more user-centric, and obviously, more private. For that we need to go back to the roots of the web and maybe even before that, the roots of computer user interfaces.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_internet_sear...
throughout this journey, we’ve discovered that
it is one thing to build a search engine,
and an entirely different thing to convince
regular users of the need to switch to a
better choice
I wouldn't be surprised if the future of search comes from an unexpected angle. The cost to train a model which has basic understanding of the world and human language might drop enough that hobbyists can do it. And then domain specific knowledge might be learned on top of that seperately, creating "specialist LLMs". A web of such LLMs with domain specific knowledge might be able to answer questions better than a single large net. Similar to how humans work in teams of specialists.
There may be room for more than one good LLM, especially in niche areas of knowledge.
Which makes sense a primary care doctor is a good doctor but a specialist is going to be better in their specialized field.
It's much more enlightening to talk about which demand is being satisfied.
Google satisfies several disparate demands, including:
* Internet discovery
* Product discovery
* E-commerce discovery
* Brick&mortar commerce discovery
* Geographical discovery
* Fact discovery (question-answering)
All of these services have very little friction. Having a single interface helps with that, but I don't think it's a necessity. Low friction is though. Nobody wants to sign up for a service to get what google gives away ostensibly without that hassle.
It does most of these things decently well, largely thanks to being able to profile its users accurately. I don't think a competitor will replace Google by trying to copy their model and do all these things. Google is far too entrenched.
There's really no reason why you would need to compete against the combined offering of Google.
At several of these tasks, it's quite possible to outperform them. Especially in commercial discovery, there really aren't any good offerings right now. Finding the best something for the price range is frustrating, time consuming and annoying.
An LLM-based question-answering mostly satisfies the fact discovery need, not so much the others. This is of course fine, but it's important to understand that Google's killer functionality has never been answering questions, it's never been very good at that task.
Arguably, the seamless localization of the results is a much more important aspect.
"Almost all founders learn brutal lessons during the first year, but some learn them much more quickly. Obviously those founders are more likely to succeed. So it could be a useful heuristic to ask, say 6 to 12 months in, "Have we learned our brutal lesson yet?"" - https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1659122079071870977
"The most common lesson is that customers don't want what you're making. The next most common is that it isn't possible to make it, or at least to make it profitably."
I am a special case because I do a lot of research. Not having anything close to Google Books has made nearly every search engine that’s not Google a nonstarter for me. And it’s not hard to see how other search engines could compete with that—work closely with the Internet Archive to put a really strong front end on that. But Google put the hard work into winning the long-running legal battle to keep that thing alive, and the result is that they now get to benefit from its stickiness for decades to come.
But credit where credit’s due. Google built a good moat, one so good that even people who stay abreast of alternative search engines can struggle to leave its clutches.
Google put the hard work into a large chunk of the literary output of the English language. No other search engine has this. If the goal of a search engine is to be the best at what it does, having hundreds of years of books and magazines is an excellent way to do it.
These books, and the riches they carry, inevitably lead writers like myself to link back to Google, which creates a feedback loop for content that is directly valuable to Google, because it pulls users back to the search engine.
I’m sorry you have such a limited view of Google’s best resource.
The typical monetizable user, insofar as they exist, is what Google captures by default placement (whether what they purchase, or just from dominating the desktop browser space).
Features are how they remain sticky for various subgroups of atypical monetizable users.
I will continue to use Kagi[0], keeping in mind that could be shutdown without notice too, so I'll probably end up using it more now.
They had "spaces". They had an ability to demote (but not actually block) sites from results. They had the ability to filter results type (documentation, blog etc.), but that ability was poorly implemented. They had a half-assed browser to filter out cookies. They finally launched a Chat AI response that was slow and laughably inaccurate - searching for their CTO's name returned a nonsensical mishmash of several people's bios.
As with so many startups before them, it wasn't competition that killed them, it was the lack of focus.
The media bias feature was added. It was silly and probably not cheap to create.
The StackOverflow integration was terrible and a misdirection. Completely unusable.
Then the LLM came. It was slow and inaccurate and in your face . I asked to have it disabled but found now way. I stopped using it soon after.
Too bad. At its core was a great engine from my experience.
This announcement is more along the lines of, we'd rather sell AI-based products to enterprises than to consumers?
It was a show off feature that solved a problem I’m not sure anyone needed solving. And I doubt it was cheap to create.
This alone didn’t raise an eyebrow but looking back now I see it as a misdirection.
* Outside of the HN crowd, I don't think the average consumer thinks of privacy as a differentiator.
* I don't know if competing on general search is the way in. I think you need a wedge, and these new companies competing on a certain vertical (like search tools for developers). I see promise here, with specialized LLMs in the backend.
* The biggest search engine in the world comes as the default option on the most popular browser and the most popular phone operating system. Even if your results are 10x better, that's a huge hurdle to overcome.
And google thinks their version works well enough. Now my search results are crap. And I have to ask ChatGPT my problem after explaining it in a whole lot of detail and waiting for it to answer.
Frankly, I think this community is the exact same. Pretend to care about privacy, but convenience comes first. Like, I think the AI fad here is a perfect demonstration. I dunno.
We like to point the finger at facebook, but we turn around and are happy to use other "free" products.
If you're not paying, you're the product.
But it seems we have the memory of a goldfish (yes, I know the goldfish memory story is false)
Unfortunately, people do not say what they truly think when internet points (formal sanctions in the sociological sense) are at stake.
They instead bend their commenting to align with the performative moralistic aspirations of the most extreme members of the group. Here it presents as an almost hysterical level of privacy absolutism over even trivial things at the expense of everything else. Reading HN you would think there’s a huge market of people living off the grid in a mosquito coast sense. But it’s a mirage.
You see this in tons of subreddits as well. Humans do weird things when you get us in large groups and gamify the interactions.
For example, I chose a real name account intentionally partly because I was afraid that a pseudonym might encourage me to just go on typing nonsense that most intelligent folks could see through, yet avoid pointing out due to game theoretical reasons.
Sometimes it's extremely advantageous because I occasionally find myself the only HN user actually engaging in a substantive discussion in decently upvoted posts. Where literally ever other comment or comment chain in the post is either not replied to or consists of just folks writing platitudes one after another, even when the initial comment is substantive.
Sometimes I get extra lucky and some challenger appears trying to knock the arguments down a peg, which provides convenient tests of veracity.
But this does require staking some real world credibility to get that boost in willingness in others to engage substantively.
I have never seen or spoken to a person who fully understands the implications of privacy violations and still doesn't care. I meet some people who do care and understand, but don't know how to fight it so they give up. I meet tons of people who think they're trading off privacy for convenience, but when I question them they're completely unaware of the extent to which it's happening. When I explain it to them they always enter the first group.
Sorry, I'm just not buying it. To the extent that people "want" this, it's mostly that they've had the wool pulled over their eyes, not because they've made a well educated decision.
This is nothing but a lie we in the tech industry tell ourselves to feel a little better about the horrible things we're doing.
It's like trying to sell a service based on it being decentralised or a social media service on free speech. It's a nice to have thing, but the majority of the population don't really consider it a selling point on its own.
I think Kagi may have a better selling point because of this, since the differentiators are more 'you can choose exactly which sites you don't want to see/do want to see', not just 'we don't track you'.
But I'm not sure even that's enough. Probably needs to be a mix of both really good marketing and search results that are leagues ahead of Google's (something that's admittedly not as unlikely now as it used to be).
I’m not sure that search is a helpful way to think about AI. Search is a 90s concept that describes searching an index of what is on the web for results to a query. Sci-fi authors never described a future world as working that way because it’s not intuitive. What is intuitive is a human asking a computer for outcomes in plain English. I think search is dying. I think ChatGPT is a glimpse of what will replace search.
That's Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Apple HomeKit? Microsoft sunset Cortana not that long ago.
These things seem related. Was it possible to try neeva for free? Even if so, a search engine is something you have to try again and again to become convinced. I try every free search engine I see on HN, but that's not realistic and convincing if I'm not really searching for anything right now.
Since I've heard of marginalia[1], I've been trying it a few times when I was frustrated with google results, and sometimes I got better results. That's how you I learned to appreciate it. But for that it has to be free.
Yes
"It is one thing to build a search engine, and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better choice."
This line in post doesn't seem intellectually honest about why I think Neeva failed: it was never a 10X better experience. e.g. ChatGPT isn't complaining about acquiring users.
I believe Google when they say competition is just one click away. A bunch of things I would have asked Google now go to ChatGPT.
True that new products need to be substantially better than the market leader to thrive (I particularly like this write up on the topic: Delta 4 theory of successful startups https://archive.is/WK96N ).
And Neeva might have been targeting a different, narrow niche (https://archive.is/ScazW) for which the product was 10x better?
> e.g. ChatGPT isn't complaining about acquiring users.
ChatGPT wasn't built to kill web search, but rather a super-capable, web-based conversation bot? Funny how that had Google on code red. Reminds me of, Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba: The right and the wrong way to compete with a locked market: https://archive.is/rY3NR
I use Google for quick searches as it still seems to be the best. I mean queries like "Tajikistan capital".
I use ChatGPT often when I am doing something not directly related to my field of work- like a quick web page after 3 months I did it last time.
I rarely use DuckDuckGo.
I use Kagi, too, sometimes when Google fails, and it is not in the territory of AI chatbots.
I also know about phind and hasn’t used it often.
I knew about Neeva and just didn't see where it fits.
Genuinely surprised they aren't annoying being acquired; their traditional search expertise would make a great companion to someone doing LLM-based information retrieval. (Not to mention their in-house LLM expertise).
Curious to see what Neeva’s next move will be.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/snowflake-in-talks-t...
I’m very glad they tried though. Gives us hackers hope that building a Google quality index outside of Google is not unimaginable
After that, they had nothing and burned all their VC money.
[0] https://www.similarweb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/C...
"Over the past year, we’ve seen the clear, pressing need to use LLMs effectively, inexpensively, safely, and responsibly. Many of the techniques we have pioneered with small models, size reduction, latency reduction, and inexpensive deployment are the elements that enterprises really want, and need, today. We are actively exploring how we can apply our search and LLM expertise in these settings, and we will provide updates on the future of our work and our team in the next few weeks."
Neeva aimed to solve the problem of ads clogging the entire search results page with an ad-free search experience. My opinion of Neeva was that it solved a problem that doesn't exist. Anyone who is annoyed with ads can install uBlock (or one of the other extensions) and hide them all.
* [1] https://neeva.com/massets/ask-neeva/does-neeva-use-bing.html * [2] https://brave.com/search-independence/
Note - they took down their page on the pricing update that was here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing-update; article about it at https://www.ghacks.net/2023/02/17/microsoft-increases-bing-s... and the pricing is still published at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing.
"Microsoft threatens to restrict data from rival AI search tools" https://money.yahoo.com/microsoft-threatens-restrict-data-ri...
Bing Search API ToS: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/legal
edit to add links
https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-opened-a-new-era-in-sear...
Neeva solves the smallest pain point ever exists.
RIP
Of course, it is just that not that many people find it annoying enough.
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.
I'll happily subscribe to whatever service I find that's closest to what I've had with Neeva.
> From the unnecessary friction required to change default search settings, to the challenges in helping people understand the difference between a search engine and a browser, acquiring users has been really hard.
How many users are we talking about? That would be great to know and since they're shutting down can they tell us? On a different page[1] they say:
> Even with a limited trial period, hundreds of thousands of users search with Neeva every month
hundreds of thousands and it can't be sustainable? How many users do they think they need to make it sustainable? What were the targets?
[1]: https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-neeva-free-basic-and-neev...
If you assume 80% of users were 'free' and 20% were paid (which is probably pretty generous), and 'hundreds of thousands' means 200-400k users, annual revenue was maybe $5m - $10m.
There are 74 employees who have listed Neeva as their employer on linkedin, so even assuming that is all staff and that the average salary is $50k-£100k (which seems low?), salary then is somewhere between $3.7 - $7.4m.
So I can absolutely see a world where they were losing a lot of money - if they paid staff $100k and had c300k users of which 20% were paid, they can't even cover staff costs before even considering hosting/user aquisition costs/office space/equipment/software licences etc.
This combined with the reports that Bing failed to cut into Google’s market show that Google is safe for a while.
I wonder if I’ll see disruption of Google’s core business in my lifetime. I really want it to happen but it’s a mighty quest
I expect (but can not confirm) this is the same reason why search engines like ddg and you.com also rely on bing's indexes.
Google's supremacy is here to stay. Only threat is bing or someone that comes with some excellent tech that bing incorporates (like openai) but actually works for search and is not just a LLM.
It turns out those Googlers brought their product-cancelling ability foremost.
That being said google is still the best search, but it's been arbitrarily getting worse for years.
I see myself using Brave search more and more. And it is completely free in opposition to Neeva. I claim nobody is going to pay for search. But people might switch from Google for better features and more privacy.
I really get tired of companies blaming these mythical users for not using their product rather than asking themselves why users didn't use the product to begin with.
Seems like a dark pattern what if they don’t find out in time?
It's because of "companies who tried to use ad to spam" is bad. Not all, but most. Mostly to the point of scam tricks.
For a company to deliver their ad, needs some kind of verification though.
I’ve been extremely happy with it as my switch from google so now I’m left wanting.
Thanks free market
I am curious have you given Kagi a chance?
I'll look again at Kagi
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.
https://siliconangle.com/2023/05/17/report-claims-snowflake-...
The Silicon Angle article cites another article from The Information as being the source of the Snowflake + Neeva news: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/snowflake-in-talks-t...
(I don't have a subscription to The Information, so unfortunately I cannot read that article's whole text. If someone with a subscription to The Information could summarize that article and share their summary with the community here I'd appreciate it!)
a.) the headline - "Snowflake in Talks to Buy Search Startup Neeva in AI Push" b.) that you're not sure how reputable the site is.
Instead, you have included several details about how you were reading some other article, leading you to think they are reputable. Then reading (the same? another?) article about a colleague of yours (okay?) where you found a (relevant?) article on that site. You link it, but don't summarize or even paste the headline and go on to discuss _yet another_ organization cited _in_ the article?
I'm sorry - not trying to be rude. It's just very jarring to me when people write in this manner where they are explaining everything _but_ the important parts.