[HN Gopher] Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is...
___________________________________________________________________
Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shutting down
Author : oidar
Score : 192 points
Date : 2023-05-20 17:25 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (neeva.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (neeva.com)
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| rg111 wrote:
| 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.
| Stagnant wrote:
| 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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-
| neev...
| Closi wrote:
| > 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-PS100k (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 wrote:
| Premature scaling, then.
| freediver wrote:
| 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.
| mmaunder wrote:
| 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.
| hrpnk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Indeed, they are purportedly in talks with Snowflake. If only
| they could keep the lights on and use the enterprise
| partnership as a subsidy.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| I think this is the first I've heard of Neeva!
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > 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/
| Closi wrote:
| > Was it possible to try neeva for free?
|
| Yes
| hhh wrote:
| What will happen to the code? Will any become open source?
| dopeboy wrote:
| 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.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I think consumers care a lot about privacy, it's just not clear
| to most of them just how much it's being violated on a daily
| basis.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I suspect how much they care about privacy depends on how the
| pollster asks the question.
| summerlight wrote:
| This is a common misconception rife across regular "techie"
| audiences. Many consumers do understand its privacy
| implication (+ads) and they consider it as a plausible
| economical trade-off to freely use the service. Some younger
| people even see it as utility! (which to be honest I don't
| fully understand yet) This is why those privacy narrative
| doesn't resonate well across the majority. If you want to
| promote a specific agenda, you first gotta understand the
| target audience rather than the topic.
| dopeboy wrote:
| Let me refine: consumers care about privacy but are OK
| sacrificing it for convenience.
| nashashmi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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)
| m-i-l wrote:
| 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
|
| [1] https://www.protocol.com/neeva-search
| tpmx wrote:
| _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
| sroussey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-
| ap...
| kossTKR wrote:
| 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.
| tpmx wrote:
| > businesstheater
|
| I've seen a lot of that crap on e.g. the Oslo Stock
| Exchange over the past two decades. Lots of money from
| local and very inexperienced (e.g. fishing/shipping/oil
| money) companies/people, looking to invest in tech and
| often randomly landing on investing in quite far out
| gambles where it's legitimitely really hard to figure out
| of there's an intent of fraud or not. The exec teams tend
| to draw disgustingly high comps though. Then the weird
| companies get insanely hyped for no reason by local
| "economy journalists". Then there's loads of insider leaks
| and trading. Oslo Stock Exchange is like the wild west.
|
| I thought this was largely isolated to small immature
| markets like e.g. Norway though.
| rkagerer wrote:
| How can you purport to build a search engine without building
| an index?
| zamnos wrote:
| Building a bot to crawl all of the Internet and save it to
| an index is a fairly straightforwards task. As Google and
| Pagerank proved though, it's the algorithm you use to
| search that index that's valuable. Any idiot can try and
| run grep against said index and give 30,000 results, of
| which the one you want is on page 53. So writing the
| crawler to build the index isn't really a competitive
| advantage.
|
| Why then reinvent the wheel and spend untold amount of
| resources re-crawling the web, when Bing will let you use
| theirs? What secret sauce for crawling web pages does doing
| your own crawl bring to the table?
| tpmx wrote:
| You're conflating crawling with querying/ranking in a
| weird way. And: grep - are you serious?
|
| (Yes, you also namedropped Pagerank for some odd reason.)
|
| The thing is, though: You can't easily outsource the
| crawling and then do the quering/ranking inhouse. The
| reverse index and various other data structures you need
| are inherently tied to the data structures from the
| crawler output. This is a very large amount of data and
| it's changing often.
|
| The outsourcing that is being done is at the "search
| query to results" level. That is why this is so
| disappointing.
| ignoramous wrote:
| One of the neeva co-founders claimed that they built their
| own real-time index from the get-go:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34333817
| DerekBickerton wrote:
| 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/
| hartator wrote:
| Very sad. Was truly a new take on search.
| wstone wrote:
| Try Kagi instead. It's a very nice search experience and and
| actually grants more control over results than Neeva did.
| tikkun wrote:
| 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
|
| "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."
| DesiLurker wrote:
| 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.
| mg wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| Google is already building domain specific LLMs. They have Med-
| PaLM for medical, and Sec-PaLM for security.
| taf2 wrote:
| Interesting that this is their approach I think in time we
| will find not specialized llms but instead a single big one
| like chatgpt exposed is the winner because it allows for a
| faster and easier way to access information without knowing
| the domain ahead of time. When google came out in the late
| 90s we had to learn the right way to search and that became a
| skill... the advantage of natural language as the interface
| is the possible removal of needing to know the right
| questions to ask as precisely as we have had to in the past.
| To me that is the big break through of chatgpt with respect
| to search and it remains to be seen if and when google will
| figure that out...
| mg wrote:
| Well, there have been operating systems before Linux and
| encyclopedias before Wikipedia.
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| collaborative wrote:
| 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
| sciencesama wrote:
| The code and infrastructure seems open source, some one should
| host it
| lobstersammich wrote:
| 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-...
|
| 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-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]
| ShamelessC wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Mostly my intent to clear confusion for other users.
| Certainly not making any judgements, there's a variety of
| reasons one would write this way and the link referenced is
| indeed useful (you just wouldn't know it until you clicked
| on it).
| kartayyar wrote:
| 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.
| bobosha wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| anilshanbhag wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| AFAIK Neeva does use Bing [1]. You might be confused with Brave
| [2], which claims to be Bing-fee.
|
| * [1] https://neeva.com/massets/ask-neeva/does-neeva-use-
| bing.html * [2] https://brave.com/search-independence/
| pd33 wrote:
| "Neeva drew on its $80 million in funding to develop its own
| system to serve results, though it still relies on Bing for
| image and video searches. "
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-opened-a-new-era-in-
| sear...
| mgreg wrote:
| And this is a critical point. Not only has Microsoft raised
| the pricing for their Bing Search API massively (a cost to
| Neeva and others) there are rumors that they were starting to
| enforce some terms of service that prevents the use of the
| API for many things including training LLMs.
|
| Note - they took down their page on the pricing update that
| was here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing-
| update; article about it at
| https://www.ghacks.net/2023/02/17/microsoft-increases-
| bing-s... and the pricing is still published at
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing.
|
| "Microsoft threatens to restrict data from rival AI search
| tools" https://money.yahoo.com/microsoft-threatens-restrict-
| data-ri...
|
| Bing Search API ToS: https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/bing/apis/legal
|
| edit to add links
| ergocoder wrote:
| People are annoyed by ads, but really it is not that much of an
| annoyance.
|
| Neeva solves the smallest pain point ever exists.
| esafak wrote:
| Maybe for others, but I find them a huge annoyance, to the
| point that I am willingly paying Neeva, and looking for a new
| paid search engine.
|
| I did not ask for ads, and I can pay, so why should I suffer
| them? If I want to buy something, I will search for it. I
| would not welcome a salesman who interrupted my dinner with a
| voucher for my next meal; I'd give him a wedgie.
| raddan wrote:
| It clearly depends on your perspective. I found the quantity
| of ads on Google to be a genuine impediment and happily
| switched to being a paying user of Neeva. For the vast
| majority of searches, Neeva was better for me. Most
| pointedly, Neeva was even better when I searched for things
| that I intended to purchase, because the results were not
| simply paid advertisements.
|
| RIP
| ergocoder wrote:
| > It clearly depends on your perspective.
|
| Of course, it is just that not that many people find it
| annoying enough.
| kmonsen wrote:
| Try Kagi?
| freediver wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| omegant wrote:
| Google has been unusable for some years. Limited results,
| capped searches... such a difference with the original Google,
| it's just a ghost of what it used to be.
|
| I'm definitely going to give Kagi a try, I hope you are not
| restricting results by politics or so.
|
| I'm paying for Chat gpt at the moment but I still need to just
| search and not to be spoon fed curated results all the time...
| the moment they include payed advertisement in gpt results is
| going to feel like browsing in the Truman show.
| nugget wrote:
| Neeva failed because they didn't understand distribution.
| Sundar became a rising star and ultimately CEO of Google
| because he directly managed more paid distribution and user
| acquisition for Google search than anyone else. Not a
| coincidence. Google promotes the narrative that they
| organically grew to dominate the search market when in fact
| they spent many billions of dollars on user acquisition (while
| also, for most of that time, having the best product).
| [deleted]
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Not best product. The only product. IMO altavista and yahoo
| were so far behind they were hopeless, relying on unchanged
| habits and noisy news.
| dehrmann wrote:
| You're talking about being the default search engine in
| Firefox and Safari, right?
| kyrra wrote:
| Sundar was the lead PM on Chrome (before it even released).
| EscapeFromNY wrote:
| That, and also bundling their browser (and hence their
| search engine) inside lots of popular apps during the late
| '00s and early '10s.
|
| Remember these prompts? https://www.thewindowsclub.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2009/12/ch...
| emrah wrote:
| Kagi is great. Please have a look at perplexity.ai and get
| inspired. We need more good options available
| emrah wrote:
| I see some people are downvoting my comment because it is
| suggesting an option that uses AI
|
| I'm not biased, i neither like or dislike AI or any other
| tech.
|
| Perplexity seems to use gpt-3 under the hood but i couldn't
| care less about that. What i care about is that it allows me
| to dig into and learn new subjects in a way that was not
| possible before.
|
| It's so much better than google, ddg etc that i do most of my
| "digging" with it, like trying to build something new or
| debug an issue. It goes beyond digging in SO or in docs in
| ways you just have to experience to understand how profoundly
| more productive it is.
|
| And I'd love to have more options. Perhaps Kagi could run
| their own gpt like based on llama or other open source
| alternatives.
|
| To each their own, if you still want to stick with
| traditional search, I'm sure those will still be around
| freediver wrote:
| We already have an experiment called FastGPT:
|
| https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt
|
| Also we have a ton of AI features in Kagi, they are just
| not 'in your face' but we have an AI integration philosophy
| that we are sticking to:
|
| https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search
| rand_flip_bit wrote:
| Ughh, please don't. The last thing I want in my search engine
| is AI, especially for a "privacy focused" one like Kagi.
| Paying to have all my search queries get routed through
| ChatGPT (and effectively used as training data) is absolutely
| not what I want. I suspect it's too late though, Kagi has
| already drank the AI koolaid.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| > and effectively used as training data
|
| Models are not trained during inference, are they?
|
| Regardless, it seems like LLMs are going to have some role
| to play in search in the future. It's just not clear what
| that role is yet.
| rand_flip_bit wrote:
| 100% the data you input to the ChatGPT 4 prompt window is
| being used to train ChatGPT 5, there is a reason a lot of
| companies are placing bans on it and telling employees to
| never enter sensitive data.
|
| I sincerely hope that LLMs won't play a role in search, I
| don't need a search engine trying to infer what I "meant"
| to type, Google and DDG started doing that and pushed me
| to Kagi as a result. Just take the words I type verbatim
| and search them in your index, don't assume this is my
| first time using the internet.
| losteric wrote:
| only in the chat app. Per TOS, data sent to APIs is not
| used for training. All thesee services undoubtedly use
| the API
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Your search queries on Kagi are paired with your credit
| card, so if that doesn't bother you, ChatGTP shouldn't
| either.
| ttapp wrote:
| I'm wondering why this doesn't seem to bother anyone. I
| always use a browser profile that's not signed into
| anything when searching, whether that's for work or
| personal. I know this does not guarantee privacy, but why
| make it easy for them?
| viraptor wrote:
| The whole point of using Kagi for me is that I've got my
| search options customised and I'm paying for a service
| better than the alternatives. The payment privacy aspect
| of that lives on a completely different layer: you'd need
| to first solve the KYC -vs- privacy problem, and that's
| more of a politics problem than tech.
| tildef wrote:
| Koolaid or not, as long as they're sticking to Claude (or
| at least away from MS/Google/Meta) I don't really mind.
| FastGPT[1], which recently became unaccidentally public[2],
| seems to work pretty well, even though it's still separate
| from their main offering. The feature creep of their main
| search engine, like the podcast search and listicle stuff,
| is easy to toggle off, so I imagine LLM integration will be
| optional as well.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35719482
|
| [2] https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt
| rand_flip_bit wrote:
| I mean yeah, credit where credit is due Kagi lets you
| turn all these things off and customize how results are
| produced and displayed like no other.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| Just btw I get a 403 developer hasn't given me access when
| trying to sign up with my Google login
| djbusby wrote:
| What happens in two years?
| freediver wrote:
| Let me have a stab at this:
|
| We will be at the end of the AI hype cycle we are currently
| in. Majority of AI/search startups that exist today will no
| longer be around, failing to find a viable business model
| that has a hope of profitability, as stuffing ads inside will
| put them in direct trajectory of Google/Microsoft's insane
| resources.
|
| Google and Microsoft situation will be much better defined.
| One of these companies will discover that being a platform
| open to developers is a strategic advantage. Ad-supported
| search as a model will fail to find ground in AI answers.
| Both companies will inject so many ads in AI chat answers to
| pay for the bills, that AI answers will become so
| intelligence insulting that even users who previously didn't
| mind ads (or had ways to block them) will finally start
| looking for ad-free search alternatives. Some ad-supported
| results will start having 'for entertainment purposes only'
| label as they will start to carry unwanted liability
| otherwise.
|
| This will finally allow large scale prolifiration of a new
| breed of search products offering search experiences made for
| users instead of advertisers. Paying for search will become
| much more common and we will be slowly exiting the 25 years
| Matrix-like coma situation we are currently held in, where
| the expectation for the most valuable and intimate thing we
| do online (search and browsing) is to be free, while we
| accept to surrender our private information, time and
| attention in return.
|
| The alignment of incentives in combination with enough
| resources and the newest techonlgoies will finally allow for
| truly amazing innovation in search, changing the way we
| consume information forever.
|
| At the same time, we will start to see signs of the first
| public search engines (goverment subsidized), inheriting the
| role that public libraries had for centuries, as access to
| information will be deemed as a fundamental human right.
|
| So when I think about Kagi's trajectory, it is surviving the
| next two years and keeping on innovating that matters. The
| business model is already sound and future-proof (the price
| will come down too).
| gtirloni wrote:
| I hope your vision comes true. I really do.
| jimsimmons wrote:
| Sorry this is totally unsubstantiated fantasy. You're not
| even wrong. I don't know how to point that out here
| freediver wrote:
| I accept that, I am not trying to predict the future, but
| to create it with my work. How do you see search develop
| in two to five years?
| jimsimmons wrote:
| Google but allowing incremental queries. Incremental!=
| conversational a la ChatGPT. So I can tell Google to
| ignore an interpretation of my query so I can drill down
| to the exact thing. I don't like writing full sentences
| or questions to ChatGPT especially when it doesn't have
| auto complete.
|
| Generative content sprinkled here and there but majority
| of results still being genuine human created content.
|
| I don't see MSFT being a player here. Their ML talent is
| shallow, their search team is tiny compared to Google and
| a partnership with a startup won't change that
| fogzen wrote:
| The exact same, maybe using AI on the backend to improve
| results, maybe for language translation. But AI is
| useless in search for the most part. People are looking
| for a specific thing quickly with the least typing.
| People don't want to have a conversation with a chat bot
| to personalize their results.
|
| I think AI is overhyped right now. Very few real
| businesses being built on GPT outside of copywriting and
| blog spam, and consumer toys (avatars, art, funny
| filters).
|
| I also think Google knows it's not as disruptive as
| people think it is.
| AlexanderTheGr8 wrote:
| Thank you for your detailed response. It's illuminating.
| That being said, isn't this mostly speculative? Time after
| time, we have seen majority of people choose ads over
| subscription. The only successful digital subscription
| models have been for streaming (netflix etc), ecommerce
| (amazon etc); basically things that have never been ads-
| supported.
|
| I have never seen a service/industry move from ads to
| subscription. People will watch as many ads as you throw at
| them to avoid paying.
|
| For example, even though youtube keeps increasing ads to an
| annoying level, vast majority of public is willing to
| grovel through that rather than pay for it. What evidence
| do you have that makes you think that that will change?
|
| Please don't get me wrong. I admire someone creating a new
| and different search engine but if you keep growing in
| size, I believe you will face the same pressures that
| google/bing/etc faced and go the same route they did. "The
| king is dead, long live the king" scenario.
|
| PS : remember larry and sergey warned about advertising
| incentives in their research paper as well but once you see
| the 9-10-11-12 digit figures on a piece of paper,
| idealistic morality usually goes out the window.
|
| Ofc this is just my "educated guess at best, speculation at
| worst". I have a lot less information than you in this
| field.
| freediver wrote:
| The example you gave is actually quite telling actually.
| There are already 25 million people who pay for Youtube
| Premium today. By any account that is a tremendously
| large number for a product that really does not offer any
| innovation or advantage over the ad-supported version. So
| people are ready.
|
| And ad-free search products like the one Kagi is building
| are able to offer much more value and features than their
| ad-supported counterparts (which are inherinetly
| restricted by the nature of the business model and their
| customer being different than their user).
|
| To be clear, I do not think that in two or even five
| years paid search will rule the world in a way that ad-
| supported search does now, but I think that enough people
| will realize that access to information that has only
| their best interest in mind will make them more
| productive and competitive in the future world, and make
| paying for search a much more viable option than today.
|
| Have more thoughts about this in "The age of pagerank is
| over" blog post if you want to spare a moment. [1]
|
| [1] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over
| sifar wrote:
| >> The only successful digital subscription models have
| been for streaming (netflix etc), ecommerce (amazon etc);
| basically things that have never been ads-supported.
|
| Even they are moving towards ad now.
| [deleted]
| data-abuse wrote:
| Love Kagi. Love paying for good software like it
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| Hey guys keep it up! I am one of your early supporter
| customers, and I haven't used Google ever since I switched to
| Kagi sometime in 2022
|
| The pay for use model for search is refreshing. I hope the
| economics work out
| dehrmann wrote:
| 9 months ago, before LLMs gained widespread attention, I'd say
| that's the most optimistic view of Bing I'd heard in a long
| time. It's interesting hearing it from the founder of Kagi
| because it shows how you see the market.
| marban wrote:
| Bing doesn't need to win -- they just want Google to be a
| little less profitable.
| echelon wrote:
| 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-f5afef98e.
| ..
|
| https://archive.is/4JOW1
|
| It's 50% of Google's revenue, and they'll suffer immensely if
| this goes away.
| jjeaff wrote:
| I'm curious what the 50% figure includes?
|
| Because my understanding is that about 60% of Google's
| total revenue is search ads, and if you include network ads
| (which would be relevant since they are at risk from AI as
| well) then it is more like 70%.
| joelcloud wrote:
| Adsense revenue from different websites will drop because
| it will be summarized and cost per query will go up. This
| AI push will backfire
| wbl wrote:
| The buggy wip maker couldn't have stopped Ford
| somat wrote:
| A strangely mixed metaphor, and incorrect, the buggy
| manufacturer did well enough... for a while at least.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studebaker
| TylerE wrote:
| Not a mixed metaphor, it's a standard phrase.
|
| Note buggy WHIP makers, not buggy makers.
| somat wrote:
| It is mixed because it is comparing two different class
| of items
|
| whips to cars does not really compare. Cars to buggies
| would compare or perhaps whips to steering wheels.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Watch the movie "other people's money" for the original
| reference
| jimsimmons wrote:
| At least on HN can we stop parroting this supposed open book
| strategy from 5D chess Nadella?
|
| Bing has failed to take away meaningful marketshare from
| Google by MSFT's on admission
|
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-eyes-
| firef...
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Anecdotally, after the first wave of excitement I don't
| know anyone who still uses Bing chat. The value add in
| chat-augmented search isn't huge IMO, and forcing the use
| of Edge doesn't help.
| vstollen wrote:
| I find lots of value in chat-augmented search. But, Bing
| is not ready yet. It is slow, hallucinates, only vaguely
| cites its sources and is therefore not trustworthy.
|
| On the other hand, I am really happy with
| https://phind.com and find myself using it if I struggle
| to understand some concept.
|
| For me, the power of the chat based apps is that I can
| explain my mental model and they can directly build upon
| that.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Restaurants didn't kill the supermarket.
|
| I still use Google, but sometimes I use ChatGPT where I may
| have used Google.
|
| But having said that we are still early. If ChatGPT gets
| access to current information and can quote sources, pull
| out pertinent parts of web pages, etc then I might stop
| using Google.
|
| That would be like a restaurant that lets you eat then
| leave with your weekly shop but at costco prices.
| seventytwo wrote:
| I've been really happy with Kagi! It's much better on technical
| searches and doesn't try to direct me to the absolutely most
| profitable commercial results like google does. Love the lenses
| also. It feels weird paying for search, but I think the price
| is fair.
| revskill wrote:
| 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.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jimsimmons wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tremarley wrote:
| It's a shame. Neeva is my favourite AI. It's far better than
| alternatives
| [deleted]
| jessfyi wrote:
| 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.
| usaar333 wrote:
| neeva.xyz was a spin-off. I don't think it is affected by this
| shut down.
| repeekad wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| nologic01 wrote:
| 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_sear...
| [deleted]
| hamming wrote:
| 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.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I'd you are on the cloud privacy means little.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| A shame. What internet discovery needs more than anything else is
| competition. Neeva was a solid entry.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| I thought they were getting acquihired by Snowflake?
| esafak wrote:
| Not finalized. https://siliconangle.com/2023/05/17/report-
| claims-snowflake-...
| intellectronica wrote:
| 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.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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
| moneywoes wrote:
| > part of the shutdown, we are deleting all user data. Apple iOS
| subscribers, please go to 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?
| jweir wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| wincy wrote:
| What was the media bias thing? Can you describe it in more
| detail? What was silly about it?
| annexrichmond wrote:
| 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.
| Zak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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/neev
| aai...
|
| [1] https://www.twit.community/t/twig-707-heartlessness-as-a-
| ser...
| peterpan45 wrote:
| What people miss is that it's not about Ai but the data. And
| google does have a quasi monopoly on that.
| winddude wrote:
| 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.
| pyb wrote:
| Never heard of Neeva before. That is probably part of the
| problem...
| rvz wrote:
| 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/C...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306890
| TrevorFSmith wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Kagi, Mojeek, Brave Search, DDG... there are plenty other
| options.
|
| Curious to see what Neeva's next move will be.
| shortformblog wrote:
| 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.
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