[HN Gopher] Neeva Acquired by Snowflake
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       Neeva Acquired by Snowflake
        
       Author : danielcampos93
       Score  : 54 points
       Date   : 2023-05-24 20:17 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.snowflake.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.snowflake.com)
        
       | toomuchtodo wrote:
       | Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36013783 ("We will
       | be shutting down neeva.com")
        
       | dpflan wrote:
       | The statements says mainly "That's why Snowflake is acquiring
       | Neeva, a search company founded to make search even more
       | intelligent at scale. Neeva created a unique and transformative
       | search experience that leverages generative AI and other
       | innovations to allow users to query and discover data in new
       | ways."
       | 
       | Was Neeva providing useful tooling for this kind of search? I am
       | unfamiliar with Neeva, never used it before. Is this a really
       | useful thing or an acquisition for the investors for a startup to
       | make sure their fund meets a return target?
        
         | refulgentis wrote:
         | Both. It's v. nice to have a package deal of 50 xooglers who
         | can build a search stack
        
           | dpflan wrote:
           | What kept Neeva from "succeeding" on its own? I know there
           | were previous discussions, but I am not in a position the
           | moment to dig in (apologies).
           | 
           | Is their current technology that good?
        
             | refulgentis wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | johnmaguire wrote:
               | 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.
        
       | gigatexal wrote:
       | Any word on how much they paid?
        
         | WalterSobchak wrote:
         | Nope.The companies did not reveal the terms of the deal.
        
       | aiappreciator wrote:
       | The stock market reacted quite positively to this acquisition
       | (Basically confirmed a few days ago). Buying a soon-bankrupt
       | startup is very cheap, and getting a strong tech stack and
       | already formed team with strategic synergies with the main
       | business is going to be valuable.
       | 
       | This is contrasted with panic acquisitions like say Adobe &
       | Figma.
        
         | CharlesW wrote:
         | > _The stock market reacted quite positively to this
         | acquisition..._
         | 
         | How is Snowflake stock dropping 12% "reacting quite
         | positively"?
        
           | nycdatasci wrote:
           | Parent mentions this was basically confirmed a few days ago.
           | Today's drop is related to earnings.
        
       | esafak wrote:
       | So who's going to Snowflake, and who's going to their other, web3
       | company, nxyz?
        
       | gizmodo59 wrote:
       | Being in enterprise software I have heard AI/Generative AI so
       | many times since chatgpt became mainstream. Every fortune company
       | I have spoken to wants to get on this train.
        
       | candiddevmike wrote:
       | Snowflake seems like it's been losing relevance ever since
       | Clickhouse became more popular. Seems like they're struggling to
       | maintain performance vs the other competitors out there. Not sure
       | how this acquisition will help here. I don't think decoupling
       | storage and compute was a good bet in the long run.
        
         | quadrature wrote:
         | Thats interesting, i don't see these as occupying the same
         | space. Clickhouse is in the space of realtime analytics and
         | Snowflake is a data warehouse. Although you could use
         | Clickhouse for similar things it will fail at doing large
         | distributed joins and similarly Snowflake will have trouble
         | meeting a subsecond SLO.
         | 
         | also FWIW Clickhouse's cloud offering also decouples storage
         | and compute using an object store, but they found a good
         | middleground where they keep local caches of hot data.
        
           | riku_iki wrote:
           | > doing large distributed joins
           | 
           | but ch supports large distributed joins?..
        
           | berkle4455 wrote:
           | ch cluster works just fine on large distributed joins?
        
         | fhoffa wrote:
         | "More popular"? Citation needed, please.
         | 
         | In terms of measuring popularity, I love
         | 
         | https://db-engines.com/en/ranking
         | 
         | Google Trends is interesting too
         | 
         | https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2021-04-24%202...
         | 
         | Disclosure: I work for Snowflake
        
           | vgt wrote:
           | don't disagree with what you said, but your Google Trends
           | argument has a big asterisk against it - right in the page it
           | says "This comparison contains both Search terms and Topics,
           | which are measured differently. LEARN MORE"
        
         | CharlesW wrote:
         | Microsoft is also taking shots across Snowflake's bow with
         | solutions like Microsoft Fabric.
        
       | scrum-treats wrote:
       | Power play. Excited to see what's next!
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-24 23:00 UTC)