33 ms·

We will be shutting down neeva.com

373 points by oidar 3y ago

Elsie0Ross 3y ago
[dead]
smcin 3y ago
Any ballpark estimates how many paid subscribers Neeva and Kagi each have?
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Probably not accurate anymore but they published a blog post about their first three months (it hasn't been a year yet!) after their official release. It was free during the beta before then. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months 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.
  - smcin 3y ago
    Sure but sounds like they also had high churn (free and paid). Lots of people will give an interesting-sounding new product a try, but then bounce if it doesn't meet their expectations.
hhh 3y ago
What will happen to the code? Will any become open source?
hartator 3y ago
Very sad. Was truly a new take on search.
- wstone 3y ago
  Try Kagi instead. It’s a very nice search experience and and actually grants more control over results than Neeva did.
lobstersammich 3y ago
I hadn't heard of this website, SiliconAngle.com, before this week but they interviewed someone from the company that I work at (not for this Neeva article; for a different article), so they're actually a real news reporting organization. I was reading that article with my colleague's interview this week when I saw the Snowflake + Neeva article title in the sidebar on SiliconAngle.com https://siliconangle.com/2023/05/17/report-claims-snowflake-advanced-talks-acquire-ai-search-startup-neeva/ 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-to-buy-search-startup-neeva-in-ai-push 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!)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  The signal to noise ratio in this comment is pretty low haha. The only relevant information here is 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.
  - mrtranscendence 3y ago
    If we’re talking about signal to noise, comments that do nothing but critique prose don’t help matters. But if it’s that important to you to be a bit rude to someone you think doesn’t write well, be my guest.
bobosha 3y ago
Sorry to see you go, was rooting for you guys. A telling insight from Sridhar's email: "Contrary to popular belief, convincing someone to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place."
- jimsimmons 3y ago
  They went for the Google++ model. That isn’t enough to cause a switch. You need Google x 10 or 100 to unseat the beast. I’m very glad they tried though. Gives us hackers hope that building a Google quality index outside of Google is not unimaginable
  - pr337h4m 3y ago
    You'd like search.marginalia.nu. 100 million page index, on a single machine in the creator's living room, very interesting results that are super hard to find on Google/Bing (like https://hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/archive/Interviews/Systems/ElonMusk.html https://hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/archive/Interviews/Systems/Elo...)
anilshanbhag 3y ago
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.
- jimsimmons 3y ago
  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
- flakiness 3y ago
  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 https://neeva.com/massets/ask-neeva/does-neeva-use-bing.html * [2] https://brave.com/search-independence/ https://brave.com/search-independence/
  - mgreg 3y ago
    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 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing-update; article about it at https://www.ghacks.net/2023/02/17/microsoft-increases-bing-search-api-pricing-by-up-to-1000/ 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 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-rival-005821848.html https://money.yahoo.com/microsoft-threatens-restrict-data-ri... Bing Search API ToS: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/legal https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/legal edit to add links
freediver 3y ago
There is an all out war for search supremacy right now between two trillion dollar companies, with one having everything to win and the other everything to lose. In those circumstances a standard VC model of buying growth does not work even if you have a huge war chest, as you will be outspent no matter how big your investors are. 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.
- sintezcs 3y ago
  I am a big fan of Kagi and a happy paying customer for more than year already. Thank you for such a great product and pleas keep going and growing!
  - nmstoker 3y ago
    Me too! It's really good. Being able to suppress results for a few (bad) sites is one of many useful features. Briefly got a bit concerned with the recent billing tweaks but that's all worked out fine too.
- marban 3y ago
  Bing doesn't need to win — they just want Google to be a little less profitable.
  - echelon 3y ago
    Or a lot less profitable. “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-f5afef98e8eb https://www.ft.com/content/2d48d982-80b2-49f3-8a83-f5afef98e... https://archive.is/4JOW1 https://archive.is/4JOW1 It's 50% of Google's revenue, and they'll suffer immensely if this goes away.
hamming 3y ago
I changed my default search engine to neeva just a couple days ago. Unfortunate since I really liked their product. The team probably has a few domain experts in generative AI and infra at this point, and so they can make or raise more money by pivoting completely to direction.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
A shame. What internet discovery needs more than anything else is competition. Neeva was a solid entry.
jimsimmons 3y ago
Appreciate the honest retrospective. 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
- extheat 3y ago
  Failed makes it sound like things are over. Bing Chat is still under a waitlist, they're just getting started in terms of LLM integration into Search.
- ragnarsson 3y ago
  I have written crawlers for a while, most sites are unfriendly to anything other than Google (maybe they spare bing as well), some make it downright impossible without extensive work on evading their blocking techniques. 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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kthejoker2 3y ago
I thought they were getting acquihired by Snowflake?
- esafak 3y ago
  Not finalized. https://siliconangle.com/2023/05/17/report-claims-snowflake-advanced-talks-acquire-ai-search-startup-neeva/ https://siliconangle.com/2023/05/17/report-claims-snowflake-...
jweir 3y ago
Neeva was great and I enjoyed using it until… 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.
- wombatpm 3y ago
  I agree 100%. I loved it when I started using 2years ago and have been sad to watch its downward slide for the reasons you indicated. Time to switch to kagi
- repeekad 3y ago
  Yup, they got distracted and didn’t seem to focus on their core mission. So much focus on crypto, then growth features like “media bias”, then AI which they had zero hope in winning. It felt like they were always chasing their tail.
  - ignoramous 3y ago
    > ...then AI which they had zero hope in winning. This announcement is more along the lines of, we'd rather sell AI-based products to enterprises than to consumers?
- wincy 3y ago
  What was the media bias thing? Can you describe it in more detail? What was silly about it?
  - jweir 3y ago
    You could search news and have an option to select if you wanted your results more right wing or left wing. 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.
vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago
[dead]
Brendinooo 3y ago
I think this is the first I’ve heard of Neeva!
Stagnant 3y ago
Sad to see them go. I just learned about Neeva and Kagi a couple weeks ago. In general the search results on both of them seem to be much better compared to google but I've mostly used Neeva so far because of the lack of need to log in.
m-i-l 3y ago
Note that Neeva wasn't exactly a small player, managing to burn through $77.5M in VC funding over the space of just 3 years[0]. Note also that, at least at the start of that 3 year period, they simply bought in results from Bing rather than build their own index[1]. [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/neeva https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/neeva [1] https://www.protocol.com/neeva-search https://www.protocol.com/neeva-search
- tpmx 3y ago
  Note also that, at least at the start of that 3 year period, they simply bought in results from Bing rather than build their own index[1]. 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 https://i.imgur.com/0YBorgG.png
  - sroussey 3y ago
    Microsoft is also not letting people use the Bing API for AI anymore. I was curious if Neeva would survive that. I guess we have the answer.
    - theolivenbaum 3y ago
      Plus they increased significantly the price per query, I was really wondering how this would affect Neeva and others building on top of it https://techmonitor.ai/technology/software/bing-microsoft-api-openai-chatgpt https://techmonitor.ai/technology/software/bing-microsoft-ap...
  - kossTKR 3y ago
    Never heard of Neeva either. 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.
DerekBickerton 3y ago
Wanted to try Neeva since they launched, but DuckDuckGo has served me well over the years and I can't really complain about the results. Only on a rare occasion do I need to make a long-tail query where I surmise Google/Neeva will do a better job at results. That's once every ~1000 DDG searches though, and I append a !g command to my query to redirect to The Google in that case. 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. [0] https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
tikkun 3y ago
Related: "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 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."
mg 3y ago
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 On the other hand, ChatGPT is the fastest growing product in human history. Because it beats Google for many types of searches. A friend of mine recently said that a good old Google search now feels like having to go to the library. 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.
- impulser_ 3y ago
  Google is already building domain specific LLMs. They have Med-PaLM for medical, and Sec-PaLM for security.
  - mg 3y ago
    Well, there have been operating systems before Linux and encyclopedias before Wikipedia.
    - nine_k 3y ago
      Britannica is still in a relatively high regard, and I heard that Windows and iOS are not entirely marginal. There may be room for more than one good LLM, especially in niche areas of knowledge.
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        Maybe, but that'll be B2B, just like how most of the niche 'competitors' to Wikipedia are now.
    - anenefan 3y ago
NelsonMinar 3y ago
What a shame. I really liked Neeva the times I used it, although not quite enough to replace Google for me. They were the most credible alternative for an English-based true competitor to Google and Bing, the distant second. 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).
- greyman 3y ago
  This is strange, I tried it a few times via Poe app, where they integrated it recently, and the results were very weak. Good alternative to Bing is phind.com in my opinion.
jessfyi 3y ago
They never seemed focused on their core mission of delivering better search results than Google and instead felt like they were constantly jumping from trend to trend to draw hype and subsequent funding rounds (the neeva.xyz crypto pivot is when I jumped off the train.) Simply being ad-free or "privacy" focused was never going to be enough for the average consumer or the user who wanted results beyond typical SEO spam, low quality news, or overviews lacking actual depth. 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.
- repeekad 3y ago
  I think a perfect example of this is sports. Sports results are objectively better on Neeva than google, in part because they’re not ad driven and can return immersive full page experiences. But I think they got distracted with crypto and AI, neither of which they were ever going to win.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  Hearing that they dabbled in crypto and AI makes me wonder if being privacy-focused was another such trend. 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.
- usaar333 3y ago
  neeva.xyz was a spin-off. I don't think it is affected by this shut down.
- kodah 3y ago
  I had an entirely different experience. Neeva's product has been far superior to Google for me. I do wish that they invested more into isolating your search profiles; eg: one for engineering work and one for my personal life. They had this feature about halfway implemented to what I wanted. Personally I think it's like they put it, there's a massive search war going on and their tiny platform is a casualty.
m3kw9 3y ago
I’d you are on the cloud privacy means little.
tremarley 3y ago
It's a shame. Neeva is my favourite AI. It's far better than alternatives
shortformblog 3y ago
I feel bad this is how the journey ended for Neeva. I will say the big challenge for any competitor to Google from my point of view is that nobody else has as compelling of a search-based news product, and likewise the size of Google’s moat from Google Books is going to be a massive lift for any company to compete with. 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.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  If you saying that Google books is a major factor/contributor in driving traffic to Google vs. other engines (ie. moat), I disagree. I doubt that this is a factor at all to the typical monetizable user.
  - shortformblog 3y ago
    Well, you can disagree all you want, but the truth is, factors like these help make Google feel more complete to people doing their searches. It’s an inertia play. 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.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > I doubt that this is a factor at all to the typical monetizable user. reply 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.
freedomben 3y ago
They talk about how hard it is to convince users to switch: > 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-neeva-premium https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-neeva-free-basic-and-neev...
- Closi 3y ago
  > 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? 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.
  - esafak 3y ago
    Premature scaling, then.
- freediver 3y ago
  From what is publicly available they at one point had 1M users and only 20k paid customers, so roughly a 2% free to paid conversion rate. So it appears that acquiring users was not an issue, acquiring customers was.
hrpnk 3y ago
While they shut down their consumer-facing product (not the company), they will explore a B2B pivot: "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."
- esafak 3y ago
  Indeed, they are purportedly in talks with Snowflake. If only they could keep the lights on and use the enterprise partnership as a subsidy.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
> Contrary to popular belief, convincing users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place. 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. [1]: https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
- Closi 3y ago
  > Was it possible to try neeva for free? Yes
sciencesama 3y ago
The code and infrastructure seems open source, some one should host it
annexrichmond 3y ago
I was reached out by a recruiter from Neeva just a few months ago. I remember because I was considering to follow through with the opportunity. Crazy they went from recruiting to shutting down completely this quickly.
pyb 3y ago
Never heard of Neeva before. That is probably part of the problem...
mmaunder 3y ago
Launched in 2021 and in Europe in 2022. Not much time to iterate or pivot. 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.
- ignoramous 3y ago
  > What is intuitive is a human asking a computer for outcomes in plain English. That's Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Apple HomeKit? Microsoft sunset Cortana not that long ago.
dopeboy 3y ago
Much respect to Neeva for being in the arena. Couple thoughts: * 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.
- nashashmi 3y ago
  The personalized search engine is a gamble. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. 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.
- internetter 3y ago
  > Outside of the HN crowd, I don't think the average consumer thinks of privacy as a differentiator. 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.
  - tagyro 3y ago
    I feel you! When I complained a couple of weeks ago about a high-profile chat app, that is "free" and had no business model, I got downvoted. 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)
  - pembrook 3y ago
    This is the issue with trying to derive market insights from an upvote based community. 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.
Zak 3y ago
I'm in the target audience. I know what a search engine is. I know how to change my default search engine in all of my browsers, which I know are distinct from search engines. I care about privacy enough that I default to DuckDuckGo, not Google. It would take some convincing, but I'm neither opposed nor unable to pay for a better search engine. I read HN somewhat regularly. This is the first time I've heard of Neeva.
- collaborative 3y ago
  Distribution is blocked by big tech and even mentioning what you are working on will get you perma banned from most subreddits because of "spam" In fact, HN is a rara avis in that it allows "Show HN" posts
  - Zak 3y ago
    "Hey everyone, I'm working on [commercial product]" from someone who isn't already an active member of a community will be seen as spam most places regardless of big tech influence. A bit of searching finds a couple posts about Neeva on big subreddits, which typically didn't get any traction[0]. Of course, the conspiratorial answer is that reddit lies about votes to suppress things it doesn't like, but I have seen no reason to believe that. 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_search_engine_neeva_trials_ai_helper/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10diym9/neevaai... [1] https://www.twit.community/t/twig-707-heartlessness-as-a-service/14322/8 https://www.twit.community/t/twig-707-heartlessness-as-a-ser...
    - collaborative 3y ago
      Interesting. What I mean is that forums used to feel welcoming and moderators were much more hands off - usually only acting because of general outcries People would also usually post from multiple users whereas now it's all about tanking karma
TrevorFSmith 3y ago
It's possible to be a long lived, consumer-oriented search provider. It might not be possible to do it in a way to satisfy VC managers. If a business takes more than five years to crush existing players then a growth company funded by VC isn't a good path.
dotcoma 3y ago
Kagi, Mojeek, Brave Search, DDG… there are plenty other options. Curious to see what Neeva’s next move will be.
DesiLurker 3y ago
they should at least open source the search engine code. whats the point in holding on to it or selling to some patent troll for pennies? maybe somebody like wikipedia foundation with moderately deep pockets will do a 'good enough' search for super cheap.
nologic01 3y ago
I used Ecosia (of planting trees fame) to find the list of failed search engines. The first result is a Wikipedia category page that lists 81 of them [1]. 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_search_engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_internet_sear...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
_qqko 3y ago
What people miss is that it’s not about Ai but the data. And google does have a quasi monopoly on that.
winddude 3y ago
That didn't last long... I think search is largely brand recognition... plus it's got to be hard to monitise now. Two of the largest tech companies, also own two of the largest search engines, and the two largest ad networks, plus everyone runs an ad blocker. And it got be massively expensive to run the infrastructure. That being said google is still the best search, but it's been arbitrarily getting worse for years.
rg111 3y ago
I use code.you.com for my code searches and use the AI by You very frequently- more than ChatGPT. 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.
- esafak 3y ago
  No ads.
revskill 3y ago
Ad is bad not because Ad is bad. 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.
- esafak 3y ago
  Ad is bad, though. I did not ask for ads. It wastes my time and energy, at least.
intellectronica 3y ago
I really wanted to love Neeva, and became a paid subscriber as soon as I heard about it (a couple of months ago). Tried it for a few days and then gave up and cancelled my subscription. The product was simply really bad - search results were significantly worse than other (freely available, ad supported) search engines, the AI was very limited, and the personal search features were broken, authentication was broken and their support didn't even commit to fixing it in the future. In retrospect, I think Neeva had a cool mission, but the problem wasn't, or wasn't only, that they couldn't convince users to give them a try, but that even once they did convince users to give it a try the product was just not there.
collaborative 3y ago
I am sorry this happened to Neeva. My much less known search engine costs me little $ + my time. This makes a huge difference vs VC funded ideas that need runway and hype to IPO. And nowadays hype is in high supply. It almost feels like people are experiencing hype overdose
kartayyar 3y ago
I tried Neeva, and the quality of results was just not there. Would have been happy to pay. "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.
- ignoramous 3y ago
  > ...it was never a 10X better experience. 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 https://archive.is/WK96N ). And Neeva might have been targeting a different, narrow niche (https://archive.is/ScazW 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 https://archive.is/rY3NR
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
I’m a paying Neeva user and I was extremely surprised to see that they’re shutting down after less than a year in operation. I’ve been extremely happy with it as my switch from google so now I’m left wanting. Thanks free market
- freediver 3y ago
  > I’ve been extremely happy with it as my switch from google so now I’m left wanting. I am curious have you given Kagi a chance?
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    I have and liked what it was, but I really liked the GPT summary at the top of Neeva. I'll look again at Kagi
    - freediver 3y ago
      Kagi has the same thing, it is called "Quick Answer".
      - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
        Thanks! Yeah I've fully switched over now
rvz 3y ago
Unsurprising. This is why Neeva failed. [0] Also with Bing disallowing its partners to bootstrap their own LLM search engines with Bing's search data. [1] After that, they had nothing and burned all their VC money. [0] https://www.similarweb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/ChatGPT-and-Search-Engines.png https://www.similarweb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/C... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306890
moneywoes 3y ago
> part of the shutdown, we are deleting all user data. Apple iOS subscribers, please go to https://reportaproblem.apple.com/ https://reportaproblem.apple.com/ to request your refund as soon as possible. Seems like a dark pattern what if they don’t find out in time?
- KomoD 3y ago
  How is that a dark pattern?
KomoD 3y ago
lol, not surprised, it was bad and i didnt trust their "privacy" aspect at all considering the founders are ex-svp of ads at google, ex-vp of monetization at youtube, and had a bunch of ex-google employees
bcon 3y ago
Too bad they chose the wrong differentiation, when Neeva launched I wrote: "if I were Neeva, I'd attempt to make search a better experience, by providing better results and context than Google does. I'd classify users according to their search history/sophistication and prefer results that other users in their class have found helpful, while at the same time making clear that the results are tailored based on their search history and offering a way to remove the class restriction. Search that uses my and other users search history to become better, in a transparent way, that's what I'd subscribe to." http://benconrad.net/posts/200629_searchingForInformation/ http://benconrad.net/posts/200629_searchingForInformation/
- somethingor 3y ago
  How would you determine if someone found something helpful?
ummonk 3y ago
Ideally Apple would snap up the technology and index they've built and integrate it with Siri.
vinaypai 3y ago
I used Neeva for a while as my primary search engine. They had good ideas but seemed to want to do everything (poorly) instead of committing to anything in particular. 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.
wdr1 3y ago
FYI, according The Information they're in discussions to be acquired by Snowflake. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/snowflake-in-talks-to-buy-search-startup-neeva-in-ai-push https://www.theinformation.com/articles/snowflake-in-talks-t...
Josh613 3y ago
[dead]
guerrilla 3y ago
How's marginalia doing? I'm really satisfied with Brave Search, especially the fact that it's AI cites its sources.
not_your_vase 3y ago
Sad news, but can't help seeing some irony. Everybody thought that it will be great, since it is created by Googlers, the very definition of internet searching itself. It turns out those Googlers brought their product-cancelling ability foremost.
draz1c 3y ago
Let's switch to YaCy
amai 3y ago
Brave Search AI Summarizer is surprisingly useful: https://brave.com/ai-summarizer/ https://brave.com/ai-summarizer/ 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.
weare138 3y ago
But 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 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.
NoPicklez 3y ago
I've Neeva heard of them
pm27 3y ago
Try https://searche.org https://searche.org

373 points by oidar 3y ago

Elsie0Ross 3y ago

[dead]

smcin 3y ago

Any ballpark estimates how many paid subscribers Neeva and Kagi each have?

mardifoufs 3y ago
Probably not accurate anymore but they published a blog post about their first three months (it hasn't been a year yet!) after their official release. It was free during the beta before then. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months 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.
- smcin 3y ago
  Sure but sounds like they also had high churn (free and paid). Lots of people will give an interesting-sounding new product a try, but then bounce if it doesn't meet their expectations.

hhh 3y ago

What will happen to the code? Will any become open source?

hartator 3y ago

Very sad. Was truly a new take on search.

wstone 3y ago
Try Kagi instead. It’s a very nice search experience and and actually grants more control over results than Neeva did.

lobstersammich 3y ago

I hadn't heard of this website, SiliconAngle.com, before this week but they interviewed someone from the company that I work at (not for this Neeva article; for a different article), so they're actually a real news reporting organization. I was reading that article with my colleague's interview this week when I saw the Snowflake + Neeva article title in the sidebar on SiliconAngle.com https://siliconangle.com/2023/05/17/report-claims-snowflake-advanced-talks-acquire-ai-search-startup-neeva/ 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-to-buy-search-startup-neeva-in-ai-push 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!)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ShamelessC 3y ago
The signal to noise ratio in this comment is pretty low haha. The only relevant information here is 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.
- mrtranscendence 3y ago
  If we’re talking about signal to noise, comments that do nothing but critique prose don’t help matters. But if it’s that important to you to be a bit rude to someone you think doesn’t write well, be my guest.

bobosha 3y ago

Sorry to see you go, was rooting for you guys. A telling insight from Sridhar's email: "Contrary to popular belief, convincing someone to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place."

jimsimmons 3y ago
They went for the Google++ model. That isn’t enough to cause a switch. You need Google x 10 or 100 to unseat the beast. I’m very glad they tried though. Gives us hackers hope that building a Google quality index outside of Google is not unimaginable
- pr337h4m 3y ago
  You'd like search.marginalia.nu. 100 million page index, on a single machine in the creator's living room, very interesting results that are super hard to find on Google/Bing (like https://hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/archive/Interviews/Systems/ElonMusk.html https://hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/archive/Interviews/Systems/Elo...)

anilshanbhag 3y ago

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.

jimsimmons 3y ago
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
flakiness 3y ago
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 https://neeva.com/massets/ask-neeva/does-neeva-use-bing.html * [2] https://brave.com/search-independence/ https://brave.com/search-independence/
- mgreg 3y ago
  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 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing-update; article about it at https://www.ghacks.net/2023/02/17/microsoft-increases-bing-search-api-pricing-by-up-to-1000/ 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 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-rival-005821848.html https://money.yahoo.com/microsoft-threatens-restrict-data-ri... Bing Search API ToS: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/legal https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/legal edit to add links

freediver 3y ago

There is an all out war for search supremacy right now between two trillion dollar companies, with one having everything to win and the other everything to lose. In those circumstances a standard VC model of buying growth does not work even if you have a huge war chest, as you will be outspent no matter how big your investors are. 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.

sintezcs 3y ago
I am a big fan of Kagi and a happy paying customer for more than year already. Thank you for such a great product and pleas keep going and growing!
- nmstoker 3y ago
  Me too! It's really good. Being able to suppress results for a few (bad) sites is one of many useful features. Briefly got a bit concerned with the recent billing tweaks but that's all worked out fine too.
marban 3y ago
Bing doesn't need to win — they just want Google to be a little less profitable.
- echelon 3y ago
  Or a lot less profitable. “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-f5afef98e8eb https://www.ft.com/content/2d48d982-80b2-49f3-8a83-f5afef98e... https://archive.is/4JOW1 https://archive.is/4JOW1 It's 50% of Google's revenue, and they'll suffer immensely if this goes away.

hamming 3y ago

I changed my default search engine to neeva just a couple days ago. Unfortunate since I really liked their product. The team probably has a few domain experts in generative AI and infra at this point, and so they can make or raise more money by pivoting completely to direction.

marginalia_nu 3y ago

A shame. What internet discovery needs more than anything else is competition. Neeva was a solid entry.

jimsimmons 3y ago

Appreciate the honest retrospective. 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

extheat 3y ago
Failed makes it sound like things are over. Bing Chat is still under a waitlist, they're just getting started in terms of LLM integration into Search.
ragnarsson 3y ago
I have written crawlers for a while, most sites are unfriendly to anything other than Google (maybe they spare bing as well), some make it downright impossible without extensive work on evading their blocking techniques. 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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kthejoker2 3y ago

I thought they were getting acquihired by Snowflake?

esafak 3y ago
Not finalized. https://siliconangle.com/2023/05/17/report-claims-snowflake-advanced-talks-acquire-ai-search-startup-neeva/ https://siliconangle.com/2023/05/17/report-claims-snowflake-...

jweir 3y ago

Neeva was great and I enjoyed using it until… 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.

wombatpm 3y ago
I agree 100%. I loved it when I started using 2years ago and have been sad to watch its downward slide for the reasons you indicated. Time to switch to kagi
repeekad 3y ago
Yup, they got distracted and didn’t seem to focus on their core mission. So much focus on crypto, then growth features like “media bias”, then AI which they had zero hope in winning. It felt like they were always chasing their tail.
- ignoramous 3y ago
  > ...then AI which they had zero hope in winning. This announcement is more along the lines of, we'd rather sell AI-based products to enterprises than to consumers?
wincy 3y ago
What was the media bias thing? Can you describe it in more detail? What was silly about it?
- jweir 3y ago
  You could search news and have an option to select if you wanted your results more right wing or left wing. 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.

vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago

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Brendinooo 3y ago

I think this is the first I’ve heard of Neeva!

Stagnant 3y ago

Sad to see them go. I just learned about Neeva and Kagi a couple weeks ago. In general the search results on both of them seem to be much better compared to google but I've mostly used Neeva so far because of the lack of need to log in.

m-i-l 3y ago

Note that Neeva wasn't exactly a small player, managing to burn through $77.5M in VC funding over the space of just 3 years[0]. Note also that, at least at the start of that 3 year period, they simply bought in results from Bing rather than build their own index[1]. [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/neeva https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/neeva [1] https://www.protocol.com/neeva-search https://www.protocol.com/neeva-search

tpmx 3y ago
Note also that, at least at the start of that 3 year period, they simply bought in results from Bing rather than build their own index[1]. 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 https://i.imgur.com/0YBorgG.png
- sroussey 3y ago
  Microsoft is also not letting people use the Bing API for AI anymore. I was curious if Neeva would survive that. I guess we have the answer.
  - theolivenbaum 3y ago
    Plus they increased significantly the price per query, I was really wondering how this would affect Neeva and others building on top of it https://techmonitor.ai/technology/software/bing-microsoft-api-openai-chatgpt https://techmonitor.ai/technology/software/bing-microsoft-ap...
- kossTKR 3y ago
  Never heard of Neeva either. 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.

DerekBickerton 3y ago

Wanted to try Neeva since they launched, but DuckDuckGo has served me well over the years and I can't really complain about the results. Only on a rare occasion do I need to make a long-tail query where I surmise Google/Neeva will do a better job at results. That's once every ~1000 DDG searches though, and I append a !g command to my query to redirect to The Google in that case. 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. [0] https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/

tikkun 3y ago

Related: "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 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."

mg 3y ago

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 On the other hand, ChatGPT is the fastest growing product in human history. Because it beats Google for many types of searches. A friend of mine recently said that a good old Google search now feels like having to go to the library. 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.

impulser_ 3y ago
Google is already building domain specific LLMs. They have Med-PaLM for medical, and Sec-PaLM for security.
- mg 3y ago
  Well, there have been operating systems before Linux and encyclopedias before Wikipedia.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    Britannica is still in a relatively high regard, and I heard that Windows and iOS are not entirely marginal. There may be room for more than one good LLM, especially in niche areas of knowledge.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Maybe, but that'll be B2B, just like how most of the niche 'competitors' to Wikipedia are now.
  - anenefan 3y ago

NelsonMinar 3y ago

What a shame. I really liked Neeva the times I used it, although not quite enough to replace Google for me. They were the most credible alternative for an English-based true competitor to Google and Bing, the distant second. 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).

greyman 3y ago
This is strange, I tried it a few times via Poe app, where they integrated it recently, and the results were very weak. Good alternative to Bing is phind.com in my opinion.

jessfyi 3y ago

They never seemed focused on their core mission of delivering better search results than Google and instead felt like they were constantly jumping from trend to trend to draw hype and subsequent funding rounds (the neeva.xyz crypto pivot is when I jumped off the train.) Simply being ad-free or "privacy" focused was never going to be enough for the average consumer or the user who wanted results beyond typical SEO spam, low quality news, or overviews lacking actual depth. 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.

repeekad 3y ago
I think a perfect example of this is sports. Sports results are objectively better on Neeva than google, in part because they’re not ad driven and can return immersive full page experiences. But I think they got distracted with crypto and AI, neither of which they were ever going to win.
dehrmann 3y ago
Hearing that they dabbled in crypto and AI makes me wonder if being privacy-focused was another such trend. 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.
usaar333 3y ago
neeva.xyz was a spin-off. I don't think it is affected by this shut down.
kodah 3y ago
I had an entirely different experience. Neeva's product has been far superior to Google for me. I do wish that they invested more into isolating your search profiles; eg: one for engineering work and one for my personal life. They had this feature about halfway implemented to what I wanted. Personally I think it's like they put it, there's a massive search war going on and their tiny platform is a casualty.

m3kw9 3y ago

I’d you are on the cloud privacy means little.

tremarley 3y ago

It's a shame. Neeva is my favourite AI. It's far better than alternatives

shortformblog 3y ago

I feel bad this is how the journey ended for Neeva. I will say the big challenge for any competitor to Google from my point of view is that nobody else has as compelling of a search-based news product, and likewise the size of Google’s moat from Google Books is going to be a massive lift for any company to compete with. 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.

whimsicalism 3y ago
If you saying that Google books is a major factor/contributor in driving traffic to Google vs. other engines (ie. moat), I disagree. I doubt that this is a factor at all to the typical monetizable user.
- shortformblog 3y ago
  Well, you can disagree all you want, but the truth is, factors like these help make Google feel more complete to people doing their searches. It’s an inertia play. 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.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > I doubt that this is a factor at all to the typical monetizable user. reply 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.

freedomben 3y ago

They talk about how hard it is to convince users to switch: > 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-neeva-premium https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-neeva-free-basic-and-neev...

Closi 3y ago
> 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? 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.
- esafak 3y ago
  Premature scaling, then.
freediver 3y ago
From what is publicly available they at one point had 1M users and only 20k paid customers, so roughly a 2% free to paid conversion rate. So it appears that acquiring users was not an issue, acquiring customers was.

hrpnk 3y ago

While they shut down their consumer-facing product (not the company), they will explore a B2B pivot: "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."

esafak 3y ago
Indeed, they are purportedly in talks with Snowflake. If only they could keep the lights on and use the enterprise partnership as a subsidy.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

> Contrary to popular belief, convincing users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place. 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. [1]: https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/

Closi 3y ago
> Was it possible to try neeva for free? Yes

sciencesama 3y ago

The code and infrastructure seems open source, some one should host it

annexrichmond 3y ago

I was reached out by a recruiter from Neeva just a few months ago. I remember because I was considering to follow through with the opportunity. Crazy they went from recruiting to shutting down completely this quickly.

pyb 3y ago

Never heard of Neeva before. That is probably part of the problem...

mmaunder 3y ago

Launched in 2021 and in Europe in 2022. Not much time to iterate or pivot. 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.

ignoramous 3y ago
> What is intuitive is a human asking a computer for outcomes in plain English. That's Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Apple HomeKit? Microsoft sunset Cortana not that long ago.

dopeboy 3y ago

Much respect to Neeva for being in the arena. Couple thoughts: * 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.

nashashmi 3y ago
The personalized search engine is a gamble. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. 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.
internetter 3y ago
> Outside of the HN crowd, I don't think the average consumer thinks of privacy as a differentiator. 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.
- tagyro 3y ago
  I feel you! When I complained a couple of weeks ago about a high-profile chat app, that is "free" and had no business model, I got downvoted. 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)
- pembrook 3y ago
  This is the issue with trying to derive market insights from an upvote based community. 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.

Zak 3y ago

I'm in the target audience. I know what a search engine is. I know how to change my default search engine in all of my browsers, which I know are distinct from search engines. I care about privacy enough that I default to DuckDuckGo, not Google. It would take some convincing, but I'm neither opposed nor unable to pay for a better search engine. I read HN somewhat regularly. This is the first time I've heard of Neeva.

collaborative 3y ago
Distribution is blocked by big tech and even mentioning what you are working on will get you perma banned from most subreddits because of "spam" In fact, HN is a rara avis in that it allows "Show HN" posts
- Zak 3y ago
  "Hey everyone, I'm working on [commercial product]" from someone who isn't already an active member of a community will be seen as spam most places regardless of big tech influence. A bit of searching finds a couple posts about Neeva on big subreddits, which typically didn't get any traction[0]. Of course, the conspiratorial answer is that reddit lies about votes to suppress things it doesn't like, but I have seen no reason to believe that. 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_search_engine_neeva_trials_ai_helper/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10diym9/neevaai... [1] https://www.twit.community/t/twig-707-heartlessness-as-a-service/14322/8 https://www.twit.community/t/twig-707-heartlessness-as-a-ser...
  - collaborative 3y ago
    Interesting. What I mean is that forums used to feel welcoming and moderators were much more hands off - usually only acting because of general outcries People would also usually post from multiple users whereas now it's all about tanking karma

TrevorFSmith 3y ago

It's possible to be a long lived, consumer-oriented search provider. It might not be possible to do it in a way to satisfy VC managers. If a business takes more than five years to crush existing players then a growth company funded by VC isn't a good path.

dotcoma 3y ago

Kagi, Mojeek, Brave Search, DDG… there are plenty other options. Curious to see what Neeva’s next move will be.

DesiLurker 3y ago

they should at least open source the search engine code. whats the point in holding on to it or selling to some patent troll for pennies? maybe somebody like wikipedia foundation with moderately deep pockets will do a 'good enough' search for super cheap.

nologic01 3y ago

I used Ecosia (of planting trees fame) to find the list of failed search engines. The first result is a Wikipedia category page that lists 81 of them [1]. 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_search_engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_internet_sear...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

_qqko 3y ago

What people miss is that it’s not about Ai but the data. And google does have a quasi monopoly on that.

winddude 3y ago

That didn't last long... I think search is largely brand recognition... plus it's got to be hard to monitise now. Two of the largest tech companies, also own two of the largest search engines, and the two largest ad networks, plus everyone runs an ad blocker. And it got be massively expensive to run the infrastructure. That being said google is still the best search, but it's been arbitrarily getting worse for years.

rg111 3y ago

I use code.you.com for my code searches and use the AI by You very frequently- more than ChatGPT. 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.

esafak 3y ago
No ads.

revskill 3y ago

Ad is bad not because Ad is bad. 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.

esafak 3y ago
Ad is bad, though. I did not ask for ads. It wastes my time and energy, at least.

intellectronica 3y ago

I really wanted to love Neeva, and became a paid subscriber as soon as I heard about it (a couple of months ago). Tried it for a few days and then gave up and cancelled my subscription. The product was simply really bad - search results were significantly worse than other (freely available, ad supported) search engines, the AI was very limited, and the personal search features were broken, authentication was broken and their support didn't even commit to fixing it in the future. In retrospect, I think Neeva had a cool mission, but the problem wasn't, or wasn't only, that they couldn't convince users to give them a try, but that even once they did convince users to give it a try the product was just not there.

collaborative 3y ago

I am sorry this happened to Neeva. My much less known search engine costs me little $ + my time. This makes a huge difference vs VC funded ideas that need runway and hype to IPO. And nowadays hype is in high supply. It almost feels like people are experiencing hype overdose

kartayyar 3y ago

I tried Neeva, and the quality of results was just not there. Would have been happy to pay. "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.

ignoramous 3y ago
> ...it was never a 10X better experience. 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 https://archive.is/WK96N ). And Neeva might have been targeting a different, narrow niche (https://archive.is/ScazW 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 https://archive.is/rY3NR

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

I’m a paying Neeva user and I was extremely surprised to see that they’re shutting down after less than a year in operation. I’ve been extremely happy with it as my switch from google so now I’m left wanting. Thanks free market

freediver 3y ago
> I’ve been extremely happy with it as my switch from google so now I’m left wanting. I am curious have you given Kagi a chance?
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  I have and liked what it was, but I really liked the GPT summary at the top of Neeva. I'll look again at Kagi
  - freediver 3y ago
    Kagi has the same thing, it is called "Quick Answer".
    - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      Thanks! Yeah I've fully switched over now

rvz 3y ago

Unsurprising. This is why Neeva failed. [0] Also with Bing disallowing its partners to bootstrap their own LLM search engines with Bing's search data. [1] After that, they had nothing and burned all their VC money. [0] https://www.similarweb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/ChatGPT-and-Search-Engines.png https://www.similarweb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/C... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306890

moneywoes 3y ago

> part of the shutdown, we are deleting all user data. Apple iOS subscribers, please go to https://reportaproblem.apple.com/ https://reportaproblem.apple.com/ to request your refund as soon as possible. Seems like a dark pattern what if they don’t find out in time?

KomoD 3y ago
How is that a dark pattern?

KomoD 3y ago

lol, not surprised, it was bad and i didnt trust their "privacy" aspect at all considering the founders are ex-svp of ads at google, ex-vp of monetization at youtube, and had a bunch of ex-google employees

bcon 3y ago

Too bad they chose the wrong differentiation, when Neeva launched I wrote: "if I were Neeva, I'd attempt to make search a better experience, by providing better results and context than Google does. I'd classify users according to their search history/sophistication and prefer results that other users in their class have found helpful, while at the same time making clear that the results are tailored based on their search history and offering a way to remove the class restriction. Search that uses my and other users search history to become better, in a transparent way, that's what I'd subscribe to." http://benconrad.net/posts/200629_searchingForInformation/ http://benconrad.net/posts/200629_searchingForInformation/

somethingor 3y ago
How would you determine if someone found something helpful?

ummonk 3y ago

Ideally Apple would snap up the technology and index they've built and integrate it with Siri.

vinaypai 3y ago

I used Neeva for a while as my primary search engine. They had good ideas but seemed to want to do everything (poorly) instead of committing to anything in particular. 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.

wdr1 3y ago

FYI, according The Information they're in discussions to be acquired by Snowflake. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/snowflake-in-talks-to-buy-search-startup-neeva-in-ai-push https://www.theinformation.com/articles/snowflake-in-talks-t...

Josh613 3y ago

[dead]

guerrilla 3y ago

How's marginalia doing? I'm really satisfied with Brave Search, especially the fact that it's AI cites its sources.

not_your_vase 3y ago

Sad news, but can't help seeing some irony. Everybody thought that it will be great, since it is created by Googlers, the very definition of internet searching itself. It turns out those Googlers brought their product-cancelling ability foremost.

draz1c 3y ago

Let's switch to YaCy

amai 3y ago

Brave Search AI Summarizer is surprisingly useful: https://brave.com/ai-summarizer/ https://brave.com/ai-summarizer/ 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.

weare138 3y ago

But 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 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.

NoPicklez 3y ago

I've Neeva heard of them

pm27 3y ago

Try https://searche.org https://searche.org