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Comment by anilshanbhag | Hacker News Reader

The team at Neeva was A+. It is quite commendable that they managed to build a real search engine (unlike DuckDuckGo which is a shim on Bing) that was comparable to Google with such a small team.

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.

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AFAIK Neeva does use Bing [1]. You might be confused with Brave [2], which claims to be Bing-fee.

* [1] https://neeva.com/massets/ask-neeva/does-neeva-use-bing.html * [2] https://brave.com/search-independence/

And this is a critical point. Not only has Microsoft raised the pricing for their Bing Search API massively (a cost to Neeva and others) there are rumors that they were starting to enforce some terms of service that prevents the use of the API for many things including training LLMs.

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

"Neeva drew on its $80 million in funding to develop its own system to serve results, though it still relies on Bing for image and video searches. "

https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-opened-a-new-era-in-sear...

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.

Ad blocking is a constant, annoying cat and mouse game. Also, it's inconsistent across devices. I can block ads much more easily on a PC than on my Android.

I'll happily subscribe to whatever service I find that's closest to what I've had with Neeva.

Firefox for Android has uBlock Origin, and I've never felt like I'm playing cat and mouse with uBO.

It clearly depends on your perspective. I found the quantity of ads on Google to be a genuine impediment and happily switched to being a paying user of Neeva. For the vast majority of searches, Neeva was better for me. Most pointedly, Neeva was even better when I searched for things that I intended to purchase, because the results were not simply paid advertisements.

RIP

> It clearly depends on your perspective.

Of course, it is just that not that many people find it annoying enough.

Try Kagi?

They over estimated the market on the table —- in tech circle people want to end Google and are willing to pay. For the average user, they have no clue how the ad business works or harms society

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