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Search engine startup from former Google Ads boss raises $40M
- m-i-l 6y agoNote that, based on progress so far, they're not actually building a new search engine as such - they're spending the money on buying the results in from Bing and on marketing[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23960741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23960741
- kilroy123 6y agoI really don't think this is the answer at all. Any true Google competition will need a world class crawler and ML like Google.
- axaxs 6y agoI'm not convinced. A world class crawler definitely. ML? Maybe, I guess. Google took over search before ML was even a thing(or at least, a popular thing) because they were fast and had good results. And that's all most folks probably care about. Sometimes good results are truly those most relevant to the terms entered...not injected with ads, or targeted, or SEO'd to death. In fact, I'd go as far as to say Google search results are worse today than years ago for a lot of queries.
- dstick 6y agoYeah, you do need ML. But a tweakable one. I’ve built a crawler, scraped the first 10 pages of all public domains I could find, then made those billions of pages freely queryable with ElasticSearch. The result: moderately good. It was great for discovering hidden gems. But you needed a lot of longtail keywords and exclusions. There is a massive amount of textual garbage out there!
- axaxs 6y agoI gave it more thought in passing and am a bit curious what real, heavy ML might look like. And if there's value in such things. Example: I often find myself remembering bits of things, and querying Google, and the results are way off or completely irrelevent. Things a human would know in a matter of seconds, generally. I was for example trying to remember that newish Netflix movie that is very similar to the Michael Douglas movie "The Game." It feels like such a question should be easy for a sufficiently smart system. Something like Watson, I guess?, at the search engine level would be immensely mindblowing to me. The answer btw for anyone curious was "Rebirth." Nearly every review of said movie makes the comparison.
- rzzzt 6y agoThis is where semantic data would be really handy (admittedly, it's not a great example because the two movies are not linked at the moment): - https://dbpedia.org/page/The_Game_(1997_film) https://dbpedia.org/page/The_Game_(1997_film) - https://dbpedia.org/page/Rebirth_(2016_film) https://dbpedia.org/page/Rebirth_(2016_film)
- xfz 6y agoGoogle took over search when Alta Vista was a thing. Their search has improved gradually over the years to the point where it "understands" the web and the questions people are asking way better than any simple crawler/index could. It's not perfect but if Google turned off the ML, I expect I'd miss it.
- ddorian43 6y agoYou forgot it will need world class $$$. To pay a very big captcha farm because your crawler will be blocked everywhere. And a very big proxy farm, for the same reasons, because everywhere google/bing crawler is hardcoded, including your frienldy cloudflare, and you cannot have a partial of the internet.
- laurent92 6y agoIt highlights Bing’s strength. There are many memes in popular culture that if you want political results, you use Google; if you want shockingly down-to-earth results, you ask Bing. I’m still missing Altavista to get the raw results, but you get the idea: Bing cultivates the image of being accurate, and wins in all the secondary markets.
- logicchains 6y ago>I’m still missing Altavista to get the raw results This is called Yandex nowadays.
- estaseuropano 6y agoYandex: whatever the search query the image results are half naked women.
- onion2k 6y agoGoogle itself only raised $35 million in total VC funding before going public in 2004 For this comparison to be useful, Neeva would have to be paying its devs 2004 salaries.
- cratermoon 6y ago$35 million in 2004 is about $49 million in 2021 dollars, so they effectively raised less.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoAnd point being that salaries for good developers have gone up much faster than that.
- CyanBird 6y agoOught be noted that the core of Google was developed with gov grants on standford > In 1994 — the same year the Highlands Forum was founded under the stewardship of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the ONA, and DARPA — two young PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, made their breakthrough on the first automated web crawling and page ranking application. That application remains the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service. Brin and Page had performed their work with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), a multi-agency programme of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA. > But that’s just one side of the story. > Throughout the development of the search engine, Sergey Brin reported regularly and directly to two people who were not Stanford faculty at all: Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser. Both were representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining. > Thuraisingham is currently the Louis A. Beecherl distinguished professor and executive director of the Cyber Security Research Institute at the University of Texas, Dallas, and a sought-after expert on data-mining, data management and information security issues. But in the 1990s, she worked for the MITRE Corp., a leading US defense contractor, where she managed the Massive Digital Data Systems initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, to foster innovative research in information technology. >... > Thuraisingham goes on in her article to reiterate that this joint CIA-NSA program partly funded Sergey Brin to develop the core of Google, through a grant to Stanford managed by Brin’s supervisor Prof. Jeffrey D. Ullman: > “In fact, the Google founder Mr. Sergey Brin was partly funded by this program while he was a PhD student at Stanford. He together with his advisor Prof. Jeffrey Ullman and my colleague at MITRE, Dr. Chris Clifton [Mitre’s chief scientist in IT], developed the Query Flocks System which produced solutions for mining large amounts of data stored in databases. I remember visiting Stanford with Dr. Rick Steinheiser from the Intelligence Community and Mr. Brin would rush in on roller blades, give his presentation and rush out. In fact the last time we met in September 1998, Mr. Brin demonstrated to us his search engine which became Google soon after.” _____ Anyhow, I recommend everyone to read the full piece and it's sister piece where it goes deeper into NSA things https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
- yumraj 6y agoHow does a search engine, that talks about privacy, have a waitlist? Does it mean that it does not support anonymous search and you need to login, or somehow identify yourself, in order to use it to search. Does not sound very privacy oriented - am I missing something? Perhaps someone who has access can chime in.
- gigatexal 6y agoI hope they’re successful. Competition in this space is good for everyone. And I wouldn’t mind paying a subscription to search without my every search being tracked.
- drivebycomment 6y ago> I wouldn’t mind paying a subscription to search without my every search being tracked. Do you mind clarifying what you mean by "being tracked" here ? Regardless of exactly what you mean, if tracking is the only criteria, what do you think you'd gain by this "paid search that's not tracking" vs using DuckDuckGo or using Google with a fresh incognito window ?
- gigatexal 6y agoTracking is only useful for advertising. I figure a subscription would mean advertising-less search.
- drivebycomment 6y agoPlease define tracking. That term can mean many, many different things. Also, ads-free is completely different and orthogonal from tracking-free. Anyway, then the follow up question would be: if ads-free search is what you want, why would you pay for it, instead of using various adblock ?
- gigatexal 6y agoAdvertising free search does have a cost. Adblocking only works because not everyone does it. I also don’t use chrome. Eventually chrome will be the surveillance device. Tracking: anything that can tie my searches or data back into a useful set of one or lore data points for selling ads against. I don’t see how one can have a tracking free ads based search engine. I guess with ads based on context of the web property one visits, truck ads on 4x4.com for example.
- Yuioup 6y agoIs it a good search engine?
- ianlevesque 6y agoIt's still a work in progress but so far the results just seem like a wrapper around Bing. Their (mandatory) browser extension has some cookie blockers that seem to break SSO without providing me any actual value. I hope Google gets some real competition but so far this isn't it.
- Semaphor 6y agoA mandatory browser extension? Is that some kind of beta testing telemetry thing? Because that would be a no-go for me.
- nikanj 6y agoIt's the 1% fallacy. "Surely we can steal 1% of the search market, Google will never have 100%. Just one percent of Google's profits is seventeen hojillibillion dollars per quarter. Makes perfect sense to put in $40 million to grab that market share" See also everyone starting their own Facebook competitor back in the day.
- SahAssar 6y agoThe network effects of search are weaker than in social media though.
- spiderfarmer 6y agoI'm still profitable with a niche Facebook will never go after. Why reach for the stars when there's fruit in the trees?
- llaolleh 6y agoNetwork effect is strong, but we've overestimated the stickiness of Facebook. Have you been on it recently? It's effectively a ghost town. The most people use it for is for messenger.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoI wish them success, but honestly I'm just curious around how a search startup (and I mean a true search startup, one that does its own indexing) can even hope to compete against the giants these days (and let's face it, in the English language it's pretty much all Google with Bing a distant second). I mean, when Google started the internet was actually small enough that it could be indexed relatively cheaply. These days, the internet is so enormous, and user expectations around hyper local content and being constantly up to date are so high, I don't see how one could begin to compete without billions.
- gkoberger 6y agoLooks like their goal isn't to compete with Google on volume, but something else. It's a paid search, and it's ad-free, so I assume they're targeting people who care about privacy. I don't think they believe they'll surpass Google. But if they can get 0.05% of Google's users to pay them $5/month, they're making $120 million a year. That's a great business by most normal standards. (Now, I don't think this will happen, necessarily... but I understand why you'd make that bet)
- nikanj 6y agoHey I just pointed out this 0.05% idea in another comment! It really is a common sentiment amongst investors that you can just fling shit towards a market giant and hope to capture a fraction of their market share. At FAANG scales even a fraction of a percent is big bucks.
- ssss11 6y agoHmm.. the ex-Head of Ads providing an ad-free privacy-first search engine? Not sure I’d trust them...
- gkoberger 6y agoI mean, counter argument is that nobody knows how shitty and toxic ads are as he does. Google was just a job and I doubt he was ever enthusiastic about ads. It’d be like someone who worked at a meat packing factory going vegan.
- tluyben2 6y agoI do not mind paying, but not sure how it helps tracking: if you pay, they even know more about you than if you used google. So you have to believe them for not using the payment records for tracking you. They have valuable information about you; you are probably rich (who pays for search?!), you have a card so you are probably autonomous etc. That said, more competition is good anyway in this space.
- estaseuropano 6y agoNot an anonymous search engine; their selling point is that you are the customer, not the product - so presumably no targeted ads. Although afaik google too does not sell profiling data, rather they sell access to highly speficic demographics.
- tluyben2 6y agoYes, but because it has your data (and more directly verified because it's payment data) it can turn into making your the customer later on when their shareholder want mo' money (which they will do).
- xfz 6y agoFirst thing I saw on their webpage, a box saying "Enter an email". Yeah, it's just a pre-launch thing, but not a good look from a privacy point of view.
- xfz 6y agoOk, it's to be a paid service. Well I checked their privacy policy and it's not very reassuring. I don't think I would sign up for a company that doesn't either fall into the jurisdiction of GDPR or commit to the same standards.
- robk 6y agoRegardless of the validity of the business case Sridhar is a really really smart guy who has seen how the sausage is made inside Google. If you think like a Google engineering VP you can understand why this isn't such a crazy bet after all. He knows how to rebuild the Google stack fresh.
- onethought 6y agoI don't understand how that is even possible. The layers between a Engineering VP and the actual technology stack that runs thing must be vast... Googles secret sauce isn't the layers, but the actual implementation of each layer.... is Sridhar that level of smart?
- serial_dev 6y agoHe might not be that smart that he alone can rebuild Google from scratch (now that I've said that, it sounds even more obvious), but he might have the skills to find and hire the people who do. I think at "Engineering VP" level, coding and knowing all the low-level details might not be the most important skill.
- onethought 6y agoSure, but “to compete with google” that is the skills you need... think about how they started. If the solution is: “I know who to hire” then anyone is smart enough to compete with any company... just hire the same people from the competition.
- quantumofalpha 6y agoGoogle's secret sauce are its users. They get many billions queries a day and feedback on what urls all those users click - simply throw all that into modern ML and you'll end up with pretty decent ranking already. A small startup, especially a paywalled one, will just starve for data and has little hope to compete here - that's why they'll be buying results from bing for the foreseeable future.
- Hani1337 6y agoI'm not gonna hand out money to have my search history tied to my identity lmfao, who is the target demographics?
- spiderfarmer 6y agoNeeva ask you to complete a very thorough questionnaire with 13 questions on signing up. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/neeva https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/neeva That alone is not very comforting.
- us0r 6y agoA few years ago this was attempted but as a paid Twitter. I dont think its around anymore. As far as ads go I personally like the search ones. If I'm searching for BMW car service I want the local shop targeting me not 10 pages of dealers. With that said I wouldn't mind seeing search competition.
- turbinerneiter 6y agoI often run into this problem where I google for X with the intention to get information about it, but I only get pages trying to sell me X. It happens the other way around sometimes as well - i.e. looking for a local store to sell me X, but I only find the Wikipedia article (finding local stores to sell you weird stuff is probs a niche for a new startup - especially people who move to different countries often can't figure out which kind of store would have a certain thing). I think they should tab their results: Information, News, Shopping
- jug 6y agoI have an easier time understanding a subscription-model social network to help weed out trolls and bots, but subscribe just to search to get rid of the ads...? I mean, even if DuckDuckGo didn't exist, this would strike me as a funny concept. Also, I see they want to "personalize" my experience. So they want to harvest search patterns and figure out my personal life as usual? Besides the questionable ethics here, I'm not even convinced filter bubbles are a good way to reach objective information, and you'd think this would be sort of a technological goal for year 2021 onwards, given what took place in 2020.
- 4cao 6y agoTheir privacy policy: https://neeva.co/privacy https://neeva.co/privacy They still plan to collect a lot of data, and share it with: IT and related services Payment processors Analytics providers Customer service providers Vendors to support the provision of the Services Microsoft is one such provider where we may share limited personal information in order to make the Services available. You can read about their use of data in Microsoft's privacy policy. So, Microsoft's frequently-changing (last updated: January 2021) privacy policy effectively applies: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement While more competition is always good news, I can't see this as a privacy-conscious choice. Edit: You can even connect your Google account, and they will collect the data about you and your contacts from it. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting blocked for this by Google on, ironically, privacy grounds (Google has no interest in assisting an emerging competitor like this if they can get away with it, and they probably can). Then, there's this gem: We may aggregate or de-identify the information we collect. Aggregated or de-identified data is not subject to this Privacy Policy. It's been demonstrated before that this is also a privacy risk. AOL's "de-identified" release of search-engine data turned out to be a privacy disaster: https://www.cnet.com/news/aols-disturbing-glimpse-into-users-lives/ https://www.cnet.com/news/aols-disturbing-glimpse-into-users... https://www.cnet.com/news/aol-apologizes-for-release-of-user-search-data/ https://www.cnet.com/news/aol-apologizes-for-release-of-user... A privacy-respecting search engine should just not collect all this data in the first place.
- jug 6y agoYes, I assumed as such as soon as I read "personalized" in this article. Companies don't tend to do all that in-house, so they'll try to figure out your personal life and send it off as usual. I find this ethically questionable practice a bit strange when filter bubbles are not necessarily even good for your search experience. You'd think it would make more business sense out of both technical reasons and PR to steer clear of it. I mean, I see many complaints about Google results lately and they're the experts at this. I'd stick with DuckDuckGo if what you're looking for is something other than Google that is also more privacy concious.
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
- mkl95 6y agoI will stick with DuckDuckGo for now.
- elchief 6y agoCuil story, bro
- colesantiago 6y agoToo bad they raised money from VCs, giving them control over the direction of this search engine, now they're on a treadmill. Going to be acquired by Apple sooner or later for their search engine or (most likely) will shut down in less than 2 years due to pressure by VCs. Any business that raises money from VCs and touts claims of privacy being a differentiator is almost always suspect.
- skoocda 6y agoSridhar (the CEO) is a partner at Greylock Ventures. I'm sure this is not the standard sort of "entrepeneur under the VC's foot" type of situation.
- phenkdo 6y agoI'd love to be wrong, but I have a hard time seeing this succeed. However I feel somebody can/should disrupt Google by obsoleting search. Search:Information retrieval as steering wheel: automobiles With autonomy the steering wheel can be dispensed with. Hopefully someone invents something that can do the same with search, as we know it.
- Taylor_OD 6y agoI just read QualityLand... Reminds me of the personal assistant's and the amazon like services that will query searches and make purchases before the user even knows they want them.
- _Understated_ 6y agoAlthough I've asked before, a great many times, can anyone explain to me why, if I search for "Carburetor for Ford Fiesta", just showing me ads for carburetors with no intrusive data mining isn't enough for companies these days? I would, in all likelihood, click on something like that. It's easy to infer "oh, this guy needs a new carburetor for his Ford Fiesta" from my search. What possible additional benefit is there to mining the ever-living hell out of me further? Who is paying for this shit? Is advertising and tracking a massive ponzi scheme? Edit: I should point out that although the content piece doesn't explicitly mention ads, the creator is an ad-man from Google and I'd put money on it having ads anyway... hence my comment.
- londons_explore 6y agoDo you live in Minnesota? If so, you might prefer to buy from somewhere online-but-local. Do you normally buy the branded dealer part, or a generic? That would impact which ad you want to see/click. Will you be wanting to buy this carburettor outright, or would you prefer to pay $1 per month for the next 20 years for it? Will you also be wanting fitting instructions, a guarantee, tools etc. etc. The answers dramatically impact what kind of products you might buy. Yet there are only slots to show a few companies/services, so unless Google correctly guesses, you will think the results are useless. They need data to make the right guesses.
- _Understated_ 6y agoYou make some good points but is the trade-off worth it. Finding out where someone is from these days is fairly trivial using the IP address: the shortage of IPV4 means that it may not be 100% accurate sometimes though. So, using your example, working out that I am in Minnesota should be easy enough. At that point, I'd wager that people will either buy from Amazon (sell many cheap/fake/knockoff stuff that does the job) or would buy from Minnesota Bob's Local Car Parts Emporium... no data to back that up but I'd imagine either of those scenarios would account for a large number of people - My own preference (for the most part) these days is local business with a delivery option (not Amazon any more due to reasons). With your example, there is a whole bunch of extra options in there that I would put serious money on that no one can tell what I want from mining the shit out of me. Not Google, not anyone. Even with all the data they can muster, there is no way that they can make the decision that "this guy wants ad number 15, not ad number 16" with enough accuracy that the people paying to have their ad shown are actually getting a return. With context-sensitive ads, I'd wager there'd be a high chance that someone in Minnesota searching for carburetors that sees an ad for Minnesota Bob's Local Car Parts Emporium would want to buy from him... again, no data to back it up, but equally, I have yet to see any substantive data that mining actually results in an appreciable, measurable increase in sales... none! I still believe it's all (mostly) a ponzi scheme.
- qwerty456127 6y ago> plans to unveil an ad-free, personalized search experience. Expect it to be on a paid subscription basis, likely with a free trial period. Oh please gimme paid everything! But 100% ad-free, tracking-free, DRM-free, programmable and configurable! I wish my ISP could just charge 3 times as much as it does for the broadband, distribute 2/3 (or a half - perhaps that would mean extra overhead so they should be given extra rewarded too) to the websites I visit and we could have no-bullshit web again...
- apples_oranges 6y ago"Google itself only raised $35 million in total VC funding before going public in 2004." - that's about $50M in 2021 money.
- h4kor 6y agoAm I the only one who is tired of this kind of stories? "Former W of X raises Y Mio $ for Z Start-Up"
- lanevorockz 6y agoThe monoculture is definitely the most important bit. Imagine that elections can be controlled by Google, they will not always side with you.
- desmap 6y agoTried to use DDG for about 3-4 months on all browsers, desktop and mobile. Didn't work out. IDK why bc everything was good enough but there're small subtilties which felt better with Google, one thing I remember was Google's ability to understand that I just did a local search and showed me maps, Google Reviews and so on. I can't remember all issues buy I often appended the site to get the right results or those results I was expecting. Maybe I am just used to Google or Google is really somehow better (except with one thing, Pinterest). Just want to say that it's going to be hard to get people to move away from Google. Compared, leaving FB was a piece of cake.
- cjbenedikt 6y agoThat always boggles my mind. There are a ton of startups out there which tackle serious environmental/sustainable problems struggling to get minimal funding and "another" search engine gets $40m? What good will that do? Oh, BTW, feel free to vote me down as usual.
- saravana85 6y agoThere is absolutely no competition in search engine market. Google almost host for 90% searches (approx) how do they even plan to compete with google. When big companies like bing is struggling even after a decade to even compete , i am surprised at this.
- afroz1198 6y agoI use DDG!