[HN Gopher] Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company ___________________________________________________________________ Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company Author : bratao Score : 166 points Date : 2023-10-04 19:00 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (blog.vespa.ai) (TXT) w3m dump (blog.vespa.ai) | neilk wrote: | Vespa was actually very cool at the time as a document-oriented | search engine, occupying the same niche as Solr and elaborations | of that like ElasticSearch. But I don't know if it's competitive | today. | | This blog post says it's "developed by Yahoo" which is I guess | true. But it was originally an acquisition, largely developed by | a team in Norway, and apparently most Vespa development still | happens there. | dathinab wrote: | > don't know if it's competitive today | | very, it's outcompeting most vector databases on features and | maturity when it comes to vector search while having very | powerful and flexible and proven text search too | | The tricky part is, it's more a platform to build complex | search systems with then "just" a vector database. So if a | found a company today which focus is to create clever multi | phase search pipelines and train (e.g. domain adopt) LLMs for | calculating embeddings etc. then it's probably _the_ best | solution by far, you probably can get away with having only AI | engines devops and a single programmer (who might also most | times just do devops). But if you need to deeply integrate it | into a different existing search system things are less grate. | | And I would love to see some modernization, like having a | format for structured queries which is more widely supported | then YQL... (eying graphql here) | bratao wrote: | Yeah +1 for VERY competitive. The vector capabilities of | Vespa are incredible and the Text/ranking features are | amazing. I don't think any other product have those two sides | so developed as them. | [deleted] | matsemann wrote: | Norway also had the FAST search company acquired by Microsoft. | Is Norway particularly good at making search stuff? | jkb79 wrote: | Actually, Vespa comes out of the same FAST company. Yahoo | bought Overture/Altavista and a lot of other web search | companies in 2003, including the web search division of FAST. | The Enterprise search division of FAST was later acquired by | Microsoft. | daveevad wrote: | Anyone able to share the definitive history of the polar bears | that visited the office? | | https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Polar_Be... | eirikref wrote: | It had all started a bit earlier with a colleague (I assume | that's you up there, jkb79 :) pulling the leg of a guy visiting | us from the Bangalore office, about the polar bears roaming the | streets of Trondheim. We just thought we'd prank him a bit | about having more dangerous animals than they did in India. | Nothing too serious. | | So a few months later I woke up early one morning and saw it | had been snowing all night. I made sure to get over to the | office before the traffic started ruining the image of barren, | desolate place where you could entertain the idea of polar | bears roaming the streets, looking for young, fresh engineering | meat. | | I took a few photos, walked inside, and got busy looking for | photos of polar bears that could fit into this idea of upping | the Dangerous Wildlife War between India and the home of the | proper vikings. | | So I did a little bit of photoshopping, uploaded it to my | Flickr account, and sent the link to a few other yahoos around | the world. We had a bit of fun with it, but I don't think | anyone with access to this worldwide web of information will be | too fooled. (It's quite easy to figure out that there are no | polar bears on the Norwegian mainland, so I've never been too | bothered about leaving it up there.) | | You can see the ehm... original at | https://www.flickr.com/photos/eirikref/3262204184 for a few of | the comments and fun from back then. | | Edit: So that's about as definite as you'll ever get it. And | I'll never again admit to it being photoshopped in any shape or | form ;) | [deleted] | jkb79 wrote: | Hehe, it was a joke, we don't have polar bears on the mainland | of Norway. But, it was fun to show the photo to visitors from | different countries. "Be careful when you walk back to the | hotel". | sph wrote: | Piaggio is not gonna be happy that someone has called their | company Vespa. | rmccue wrote: | "vespa" means wasp in Italian, and it seems unlikely that | they're in the same trademark categories. | sph wrote: | I'll go create my line of scooters and call it Google, see if | their lawyers care about not being in the same trademark | category. | | The Vespa is an iconic and well known brand in Italy and | worldwide. If Piaggio isn't litigating it, I wonder what | their lawyers are even doing. | simonebrunozzi wrote: | Try telling that to Apple. | jollofricepeas wrote: | Little known fact... | | It is believed that Apple paid the Beatles a little over | $500 million for Apple Corp trademark rights so they could | market "Apple Music" | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Compute | r | autoexec wrote: | Wasps are a nuisance known for causing pain and property | destruction. "vespa" as a name for a product always seemed | strange to me. At least the scooters were vaguely waspish | looking and buzzed around town. What's yahoo's excuse? | jkb79 wrote: | Vespa was the internal code name for the project going back | to 2005ish, vertical search platform. | itslennysfault wrote: | Probably should've been Vespla by that logic | autoexec wrote: | V-SPlat has a nice ring to it. | fzliu wrote: | I was at Yahoo almost a decade ago, when vector search within | Vespa was first being rolled out in production use cases. It was | already serving similarity search requests for Flickr back then. | | Even though I'm with Zilliz/Milvus now, I wholeheartedly support | and recommend folks check out and try Vespa. Congrats to the | Vespa team! | | EDIT: For folks on Twitter, you should follow Jo | (https://twitter.com/jobergum) from Vespa if you aren't already. | Great combo of technical content, hot takes, and vector database | memes! | manp2 wrote: | any resource for one to learn on vector search? any textbook or | whitepaper recommendations? | | I am learning lsh right now and find it fascinating | jkb79 wrote: | Thank you for the shout-out Frank! | 90-00-09 wrote: | Off topic... looking forward to more engineers moving to | Mastodon. I have Twitter/X blocked at DNS level and still | fairly frequently encounter interesting accounts that I can't | check out. | srameshc wrote: | Every time I see Twitter/X here, I want to say this. | spullara wrote: | They have absolutely the best take on embedding search + normal | faceted search. Here is a blog post about how it works: | | https://blog.vespa.ai/vespa-hybrid-billion-scale-vector-sear... | cfors wrote: | Can anybody speak to how Vespa compares to some other Vector | Database solutions? Seems like there's so many options today | jkb79 wrote: | Disclaimer, I work on Vespa. | | If you look for just pure vector similarity search, there are | many alternatives. But Vespa's tensor support, multi-vector | indexing and the ability to express models like colBERT ( _1) | or cross-encoders makes it stand out if you need to move beyond | pure vector search support. | | Plus, for RAG use cases, it's a full blown text search engine | as well, allowing hybrid ranking combinations. Also with many | pure vector databases like Pinecone, you cannot describe an | object with more than one vector, if you have different vector | models for the object, you need different indexes, and then | duplicate metadata across those indexes (if you need filtering | + vector search). | | _1 https://blog.vespa.ai/pretrained-transformer-language- | models... | SpaceNoodled wrote: | So what exactly does Yahoo do these days? | throwaway280383 wrote: | Ex-yahoo here (Quit in 2022, at the height of salary boom :) | | Yahoo is a profitable company with atleast 5B $ in revenue. | Search and Mail are extremely profitable businesses. When was | the last time you changed your mail id? Search is atleast 2B $ | plus in revenue. Mail is 1B $ plus in revenue. Yahoo Finance, | Yahoo sports, yahoo news are all highly trafficked websites | although I dont know the revenue numbers. I do wager that if | yahoo is put on stock market, its valuation will be around $10B | although private equity has spent only 4B$ on acquiring them. | Who knows what went into the discussions. | | Why did I leave? Because I figured my career growth is | elsewhere. | | One thing I learnt at yahoo is that large companies take a very | long time to die . You can have a profitable career in them, | even if YoY growth is slowing. | Irishsteve wrote: | for comparative purposes snap do 4b a year and are a bit | flat, same as Pinterest. Last 10k I saw from yahoo is 2016 | where they also did 5b top line. | parthdesai wrote: | >When was the last time you changed your mail id? | | I get this sentiment, but I don't know anyone in my age group | (late 20s/early 30s) that use yahoo mail either. My dad did | use yahoo mail, but i'm guessing it has about 20 years left. | throwaway280383 wrote: | Most growth currently is international. Remember, gmail | doesn't work in China :) | simfree wrote: | Which Yahoo services work in China? | 90-00-09 wrote: | Interesting point but makes me wonder whether it's | meaningful. There are plenty of local Chinese email | providers, why would anyone choose Yahoo specifically? | [deleted] | chinchilla2020 wrote: | Yahoo Finance is still the best | Tommah wrote: | > When was the last time you changed your mail id? | | In 2006, when I moved from Yahoo Mail to Gmail. | slimsag wrote: | Wow, search.yahoo.com actually looks kind of nice/snappy | rgrove wrote: | It always has! This is one of Yahoo's best-kept secrets, | sadly. | | (I worked on Yahoo Search -- and search.yahoo.com -- from | 2007 to 2010) | febeling wrote: | indeed. Shows again the milliseconds really count | dathinab wrote: | and in difference to google you don't get swamped by ads | that much, I mean the search results seem seriously better | then 2023 google... | gardenhedge wrote: | search results page isn't even responsive. Because I am | using vertical tabs I need to scroll sideways.. | nashashmi wrote: | It works without JS! | vinhboy wrote: | Yahoo home page is actually very engaging (in a car wreck | kind of way), and they haven't updated it much in years. I | definitely believe they are doing well. | fermentation wrote: | Seems really popular in Japan for some reason. | toddmorey wrote: | NTT investment/ partnership | ilickpoolalgae wrote: | I don't think the Japanese entity and US entity have any | relation to each other anymore. I think US entity divested | itself of Yahoo Japan completely in 2018 or so. Yahoo Japan | is now collectively owned by Softbank and Naver under some | holding company (it was big news in Japan when the merger | happened). | mathrawka wrote: | They actually rebranded from "Yahoo! Japan" to "Line Yahoo" | https://www.lycorp.co.jp/ja/ | lmm wrote: | It's not just a rebranding, they've merged with Line. | jfax wrote: | No relation to Yahoo in the US. Spun off from a previous | incarnation of Yahoo in that doesn't exist anymore. In | practice, they're two companies that confusingly share the | same name. | owlninja wrote: | It feels like their fantasy sports platforms are pretty | popular. | supportengineer wrote: | Mail and Finance | [deleted] | ram_rar wrote: | Wow, this brings back soo many old memories of mine @ Yahoo! . | Almost a decade ago, vespa inside Yahoo was way ahead of its | time. Glad, it finally spun out. I wonder how does this compare | with other vector Dbs like pinecone, chroma... | agloe_dreams wrote: | What a weird name for a product. Even they need to tell you which | Vespa they are. | | Like, when naming things...maybe not use a name that people use | to define a category. (AKA: A Vespa is to Scooters as a PostIt is | to sticky notes) | ginko wrote: | I'm surprized they haven't gotten a nasty letter from Piaggio | yet. | tannhaeuser wrote: | Vespa is the Italian (and Latin) word for wasp, not sure | Piaggio can claim ownership outside of the domain of | commercial vehicles under idk EU or WTO rules. | bartread wrote: | And also pick something that's distinctive and easily | Googleable. I'm tired of companies and products picking super | generic names that mean I get swamped with spammy SEOd results | every time I search for information/help/reviews/etc on them. | [deleted] | peterstjohn wrote: | +1 to everybody that mentioned that Vespa has great vector | support _and_ lexical filtering. And you likely will end up | needing both. | | Don't sleep on some of its newer features like multi-vector | document fields, either... | boredumb wrote: | I've always wanted a self driving scooter. | happytiger wrote: | This is fabulous and I'm very excited to see where this project | goes. | | It definitely has legs and if the team understands just how | enormous the potential could be, annd especially why they _could_ | disrupt, I'm even more eager to see what they do. | simonw wrote: | Vespa has been around for a LONG time. When I worked at Yahoo | back in 2005-2007 the Flickr team were using it to scale Flickr - | they were integrating it in order to serve things like public tag | pages, to take the load off their MySQL cluster. | | I remember understanding it as the internal equivalent to | something like Solr, although actually it predated it - looks | like the first public Solr open source release (coming out of | CNET) was January 2006. | jkb79 wrote: | Yeah, I worked with the Flickr team on that project. Scaling to | billions of photos, with partial update support of popularity | for ranking. | | Back then, the properties had to stand up their own Vespa | cluster(s), later on we created a managed service out of it. | And, yes, the original plan for Vespa was to be a Vertical | Search Platform, that is where the name Vespa comes from. More | on the history in this blog post https://blog.vespa.ai/vespa- | is-becoming-its-own-company/ | vinaypai wrote: | TIL: Yahoo still exists in 2023 | cscurmudgeon wrote: | Still one of the top website | orangepurple wrote: | Yahoo search delivers superior search results for tech related | queries despite supposedly using Bing | lofaszvanitt wrote: | Plus the best finance page. | zitterbewegung wrote: | What hasn't spun out of Yahoo? | weare138 wrote: | Yahoo could have been the next AWS if it hadn't been horribly | mismanaged. | ramses0 wrote: | Maps. Groups. Upcoming/Local. Flickr. Tech was great, | groundbreaking at the time (however, that had its own drag on | velocity). Product "management" of anything post-acquisition | was demonstrably atrocious. | simonebrunozzi wrote: | And tens of others: Sun Microsystems, even Google, etc. | rrdharan wrote: | Could have been Google, Could have owned Google.. | | https://yourstory.com/2023/05/yahoos-billion-dollar- | blunders.... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-10-04 23:00 UTC)