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Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

Both. It’s v. nice to have a package deal of 50 xooglers who can build a search stack

What kept Neeva from "succeeding" on its own? I know there were previous discussions, but I am not in a position the moment to dig in (apologies).

Is their current technology that good?

As a Googler…way I see it, too big too quick too much google and wrong time. Launch a year later and you’re legit have some rocket fuel via LLMs to build something new.

I never used it till it shut down, and it looks like about 70% of google to me. That’s great, but you gotta avoid the xoogler trap of rebuilding the 20% of google you want to fix as a startup.

I agree - Neeva was just Google-that-you-pay-for, which might've worked as a niche... but then LLMs came out and afaik they didn't do anything to integrate with them.

It was the wrong product at the wrong time.

From your statement, it seems reasonable to assume that the people and their experience are what Snowflake is actually acquiring. (Another comment here suspects a soft landing for investors as both companies are Sequoia backed.)

We're just free associating, only like 60 people know, I presume. And life just doesn't work like that, like, some of those 60 people will fervently believe one interpretation, another will believe in another. We'll know more in 5 years

True, just playing the speculation game.

Do you mean integrate through a chatGPT plug-in, because they do have GPT-like answers, which they call "neevaAI"?

Neeva was the first search engine to have an LLM assistant that annotated where the result came from.

I think I follow, but then does that mean their product was an inferior substitute-able service for Google? What was the innovation that made them stand out more? I understand that information retrieval space has entered a new realm of hype-vs-reality so one cannot discount as you say the LLM rocket fuel they missed. But why did they miss it? It is happening right now and even open-source models may be sufficient for a search startup (or use OpenAI or Bard as a default for now until specializing themselves).

I really wanted to like using Neeva because I want to pay for a good search engine, but the results were always bad and I had to go to Google 95% of the time anyways.

The product was perfectly decent -- I was a happy subscriber -- but it probably did not get the traction they sought.

Xoogler understanding of privacy, trying to woo non-xoogler privacy fans

Google has a "collect a lot but don't sell it" approach to data, and Neeva had similar vibes (only giving "basic" search unless you opt in to having your data collected but its ok its private collection)

Big mismatch with its main audience, and that mismatch was raised early, but ignored.

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