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

• refulgentis 3y ago
  As a Googler…way I see it, too big too quick too much google and wrong time. Launch a year later and you’re legit have some rocket fuel via LLMs to build something new. I never used it till it shut down, and it looks like about 70% of google to me. That’s great, but you gotta avoid the xoogler trap of rebuilding the 20% of google you want to fix as a startup.
  • radlad 3y ago
    I agree - Neeva was just Google-that-you-pay-for, which might've worked as a niche... but then LLMs came out and afaik they didn't do anything to integrate with them. It was the wrong product at the wrong time.
    • dpflan 3y ago
      From your statement, it seems reasonable to assume that the people and their experience are what Snowflake is actually acquiring. (Another comment here suspects a soft landing for investors as both companies are Sequoia backed.)
      • refulgentis 3y ago
        We're just free associating, only like 60 people know, I presume. And life just doesn't work like that, like, some of those 60 people will fervently believe one interpretation, another will believe in another. We'll know more in 5 years
        • dpflan 3y ago
          True, just playing the speculation game.
    • esafak 3y ago
      Do you mean integrate through a chatGPT plug-in, because they do have GPT-like answers, which they call "neevaAI"?
    • jwithington 3y ago
      Neeva was the first search engine to have an LLM assistant that annotated where the result came from.
  • dpflan 3y ago
    I think I follow, but then does that mean their product was an inferior substitute-able service for Google? What was the innovation that made them stand out more? I understand that information retrieval space has entered a new realm of hype-vs-reality so one cannot discount as you say the LLM rocket fuel they missed. But why did they miss it? It is happening right now and even open-source models may be sufficient for a search startup (or use OpenAI or Bard as a default for now until specializing themselves).
• tylersmith 3y ago
  I really wanted to like using Neeva because I want to pay for a good search engine, but the results were always bad and I had to go to Google 95% of the time anyways.
• esafak 3y ago
  The product was perfectly decent -- I was a happy subscriber -- but it probably did not get the traction they sought.
• its-summertime 3y ago
  Xoogler understanding of privacy, trying to woo non-xoogler privacy fans Google has a "collect a lot but don't sell it" approach to data, and Neeva had similar vibes (only giving "basic" search unless you opt in to having your data collected but its ok its private collection) Big mismatch with its main audience, and that mismatch was raised early, but ignored.