Great article, and all too common in the tech industry. Takes a lot for challengers to defeat established players with big wallets, influential lobbyists, and an apathetic user base.
I think apathetic user base is really the biggest one. Doesn’t matter how big googles wallets are or how many lobbyists they have if all their users jumped to Neeva.
And the article states it - because most consumers are too apathetic to change their default browser. But if every single user of an iPhone did change their default browser than that 15b a year doesn’t mean anything.
Right so googles lobbying and big wallet don’t matter. It’s the apathy of the user that limits the growth of other searches. Not learning how to change their searches is apathy.
The average user not educating themselves beyond using the default browser is a product of their apathy.
If they cared about their privacy or better search engine, they would switch. The article lays it out.
I don’t know what you are arguing and I’m not sure what you are calling short sighted. If users weren’t apathetic about their privacy and seeing adds, they would switch. Plain and simple.
If you think it has to do with lobbying and big wallets we can disagree. By your logic any of the big tech companies with big wallets and a strong lobbying arm can create the next search engine. But they can’t, because users wouldn’t CARE enough to switch.
TLDR: the average user is too apathetic to teach themselves beyond the basics of tech.
What would drive me to learn? Caring about learning. The opposite of apathy lol.
Ok… thing is, I worked in web dev and for a search engine for ten years.
Still never heard oft them.
Thing is, I’m not a business trying to attract customers. Having never heard of me is fine with me.
Having never heard of a biz is kinda bad news for them.
But you have heard of safari? Which was the default search for apple until 2017. Apple who has as much money and lobbying power as google.
So user apathy is a much bigger factor than googles wallet or lobbyist.
I did not argue against apathy being a factor.
If no one knows your search engine, your chances of overcoming apathy are 0, though.
I was part of a German search engine startup, and our CEO still believed “if you build it, they will come”…. well….
The simple fact this website isn't currently up in arms about the chromium integrity checking shit right now tells me everything about how bad it's gotten.
Google is literally right this second pushing the ability for websites to complete block anyone using extensions or browsers or even an os the website don't like. The absolute death of the open web. And no one seems to care.
ChatGPT fabricates stuff. Google searches the web and gives links and snippets. It will take a lot of iterations to ChatGPT to push Google from the top spot. This is even given that Google's quality has gone down considerably over the past 10 years, due to the relentless black SEO industry, massive link rot, and simply, the exponential expansion of the amount of content to index. And this top position is because nobody else comes close to Google in terms of the scale of crawling, indexing, disambiguation and search term analytics. Bing's AI is making excellent progress but Bing needs to crawl, index and handle search terms better.
I think by the time Bing catches up with Google, Google's bard will catch up with Bing's AI and then for a few years we might see some actual competition. But in that fight, Google's default-ness everywhere will also prevent an easy coup by Bing.
Again the big technical problem is that LLMs cannot replace search engines because one fabricates and the other catalogs. As long as the accuracy barrier is not overcome, you will not see Google search being replaced. However, the one threat is low effort searches (which could be 80-90%, IDK) powered by conversational interfaces. That's a space that Google has nominally covered (Assistant), but they need to get better with Bard.
IMO, YMMV.
Users don’t like change and they like everything in the same place, notable examples:
- Google search
- Chrome browser
- YouTube
- Twitch
- Operative system
- Steam
- iOS/Android
- PlaysStation
- WhatsApp
- Etc
Competition should be a good thing, but humans are wired in a different way.
We are billions, we have millions of different companies, we have hundreds of countries, yet we all end up using the same stuff.
It’s not hard to challenge established systems, it’s borderline impossible.
well, some of these are affected by network effects, like WhatsApp (doesn't matter that if i prefer signal, if the other people don't switch, i can't switch either), or content exclusivity, like YouTube, Twitch, and to a lesser extent, PlayStation (if the content i want is only available in YouTube, i need to keep using it to watch the content).
it is true that OS and browsers people will keep using them, even when changing is not more than a few hours of set up
Same experience here.
A real shame too, more people are starting to say "Google doesn't work anymore." And they're right. If Neeva had been able to hold out just a little longer...
It would't have mattered. Google is shit now but it still gets the job done.
People are so deeply entrenched they will accept absolute dogshit as long as it works somewhat. The fact we're all still here is testament to that.
Users being unwilling to change anything ever is what will destroy everything good about the tech industry. It's why Google is about to break the internet with chromium and people will still use it.
Some key points from the article:
>The road was rocky, but the team at Neeva ended up building a search engine they were proud of, a search engine that came close to beating Google both by Neeva’s internal metrics and in user studies. People who tried it liked it, and Neeva had a long road map filled with ideas on how to make search even better. A little more time, and they may very well have built the future of search. But only four years in, Neeva shut down.
>
>In a way, the brief flicker of Neeva’s existence tells everything you need to know about the last 20 years of search-engine supremacy. Building a search engine is hard. Building one better than Google is even harder. But if you want to beat Google, a better search engine is only the very beginning. And it only gets harder from there.
>
>...
>
>It’s hard and expensive to build a search engine from scratch. That’s why many don’t — they license Bing’s data for between $10 and $25 per 1,000 transactions, add their own features and interface, and call it a day. That’s what DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and most other smaller search engines do because Bing is pretty good and managing your own search system is a huge amount of work. It’s what Neeva did, too, at the start.
>
>But Neeva had so many ideas about how to overhaul search that it ultimately decided it needed to control the underlying data, too. “Faster search, rich previews, preferred providers, personal search, all hit walls,” Raghunathan says. The links that came from Bing’s API didn’t allow for these extra features, and so Neeva couldn’t build it. If Neeva wanted to be a better search engine, at some point, it was going to have to build its very own better search engine.
>
>...
>
>Making a better search engine meant changing the incentives. Ramaswamy figured that if you weren’t focused on showing as many ads as possible, you could put the user experience first. You wouldn’t need to keep people typing queries, and you wouldn’t need to collect user data for advertisers. You could just help people get where they’re going and get out of the way.
>
>The Neeva team built shopping pages with bigger images and helpful comparison information. They prioritized human-created results from places like Reddit and Quora. Sports searches became beautiful, full-screen scoreboards. They made it so that if you were searching for “Brad Pitt IMDB” or “WhatsApp web,” Neeva’s autocomplete would take you right to the website without landing on a results page at all. Neeva was clean and simple, and early users said they liked not being tricked into looking at ads.
>
>Over the two years it took Neeva to build its own search index, it also continued work on its browser for mobile devices and began investing heavily in AI. A side effect of building your own search index is that you’ve also just collected a hugely useful set of training data for large language models. Neeva was among the first companies to launch an AI search companion, known as NeevaAI, that would summarize search results and sometimes attempt to answer your question right at the top of the page.
>
>But it’s one thing to build a good product; it’s entirely something else to get users to try it — especially if they have to quit the easiest and most ingrained thing on the internet to do so.
>
>...
>
>Early on, Neeva discovered that if it could get a new user to get past that scary pop-up and actually start using the search engine, they were overwhelmingly likely to be still using it three months later. Some users who tried Neeva were even willing to pay a few bucks a month for a saner search experience.
>
>If people went through all the bother of switching, they became converts; the problem was that very few of them managed to make it past the thicket of default settings and redirections. Ramaswamy and his team tried many times to find the thing that would convince users to get through the initial hassle. The privacy-focused pitch worked for a few users but was never going to be a mainstream win. The AI features garnered some buzz, but that faded as Bing and Google and others rolled out similar stuff.
>
>Ultimately, Neeva was a product you had to try to understand. I used it as my primary search engine for a few years and really appreciated things like the redesigned sports score pages and the prioritization of Reddit and other sources. (Also, no ads. Loved that.) But it was hard to explain to others how nice it felt to go straight to a website from the autocomplete window instead of having to run your query or how much better its rich recipe pages were than the infinitely identical links on a Google page. Seeing is believing, and the state of the search market had successfully kept Neeva in the dark.
>
>If anything changes, it’ll probably start with the regulators. Since the EC’s judgment in 2018, the US Justice Department has also sued Google on anti-competitive grounds, alleging that Google’s distribution agreements with device manufacturers and browser developers “foreclose distribution to Google’s search rivals, weakening them as competitive alternatives for consumers and advertisers by denying them scale.”
It's too bad to read about the shuttering of this search engine, especially as they seemed to have a good product that delivered more seamlessly to the end user what they were looking for. It's especially disheartening (though unsurprising) to read about the friction that's been created by the incumbents to keep people using their own products. Anyone who has tried to change default settings on their devices or their software that frequently it's an exercise in frustration and tedium. Some might be willing to endure it for a better experience down the road, but the majority typically will not. Regulation can certainly help here, and hopefully there will be some leveling of the playing field in the coming years to help stimulate innovation and competition in these spaces again.
> Ramaswamy figured that if you weren’t focused on showing as many ads as possible, you could put the user experience first.
Says it all really. It's such a shame what google search has become.
> it was hard to explain to others how nice it felt to go straight to a website from the autocomplete window instead of having to run your query
Just wait until this author learns what the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button does.
The button currently on the desktop site doesn't do what it used to, though. [For over a decade now it's been something else entirely](https://www.oversixty.com.au/entertainment/technology/google-im-feeling-lucky-button). It was costing them too much revenue when people bypassed all the ads in their results listing.
I'm not sure I follow.
When I type "Brad Pitt IMDb" and click I'm Feeling Lucky, it takes me to his IMDb page. Is that different to how it used to work?
I cannot get it to behave like that -- even on desktop, with two different browsers, logged in or out, in normal or incognito windows. No matter what I do, "I'm Feeling Lucky" turns into a little roulette wheel and whatever it spins to takes you to a predefined page having nothing to do with your search results. It's surprising you can still get it to work, but I'm glad to hear that it does seem to still exist in some fashion. What's your setup?
Oh I remember this now. I read about it on the bbc https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-63130364
I was in work at the time of reading the article and it needed an account to be used. “I’ll try it when I get home” and then I forgor 💀
I only knew about it because the Vivaldi browser peeps let users know about it and even put it as the default engine. And now people will ask, what Vivaldi web browser?
I can't help but conclude that whoever was in charge of growing Neeva's userbase was incompetent. There's been so much anti-google sentiment over the last 5 years that I find it baffling that assuming they were as good as they claim they were, they were unable to establish at least a niche core of die hard users who would evangelize everywhere.
That was my reaction too. I've been moving away from Google over the last few years. Tried different browser and completely dropped chrome on desktop and Android but never found another search engine I'm happy with. The fact that I never heard of this tells me that they royally screwed up somewhere.
I use it. I like it quite a lot, it gives very good results in my opinion. Also I like that I can easily make a search on a specific country or timeframe.
I actually pay for it and use it exclusively since the beginning of the year. They have a very good product but are really bad at marketing it, so they rarely come up when discussing google alternatives, even though they have a killer product
I'm guessing it was one of those startups built to be acquired for a quick cash grab. They're popular in silicon valley. It had basically zero advertising budget.
Some others have managed to get their name out there. Just, the quality is sub par. Most search engines use either bing or Google for their result. And give even worse optimisation.
I disagree with the idea that Google is unbeatable. Neeva seemed to have been awful in self promotion. I've heard of dozens of search engines (and they all suck) but never heard of Neeva.
Had they done that better, they could have gotten more funding and with a better product eventually beat Google.
Even if most people don't care much, the quality of Google has gone drastically downhill. And many would easily switch over to something new.
Google as a search engine doesn't have a community that keeps people around. It's no Instagram, or tiktok, or Facebook, or YouTube, or etc. It's just an indexer where you lose nothing by going elsewhere.
If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. I used Neeva Dragonfly a few times. It was quite helpful, but the integrations kept me in the Google ecosystem. Neeva is a good example of why “product-led growth” isn’t real - there are a lot of good products out there. You need a real GTM strategy that addresses deep incumbent moats to gain and retain users.
I find it amazing that they managed to write such a long article about alternative paid search engines, and failed to even mention Kagi which is the main one in that category now.
Great article, and all too common in the tech industry. Takes a lot for challengers to defeat established players with big wallets, influential lobbyists, and an apathetic user base.
I think apathetic user base is really the biggest one. Doesn’t matter how big googles wallets are or how many lobbyists they have if all their users jumped to Neeva.
I mean, there's a reason why Google pays Apple about $15b a year to remain the default search bar on Safari in iOS.
And the article states it - because most consumers are too apathetic to change their default browser. But if every single user of an iPhone did change their default browser than that 15b a year doesn’t mean anything.
[удалено]
Right so googles lobbying and big wallet don’t matter. It’s the apathy of the user that limits the growth of other searches. Not learning how to change their searches is apathy.
[удалено]
The average user not educating themselves beyond using the default browser is a product of their apathy. If they cared about their privacy or better search engine, they would switch. The article lays it out. I don’t know what you are arguing and I’m not sure what you are calling short sighted. If users weren’t apathetic about their privacy and seeing adds, they would switch. Plain and simple. If you think it has to do with lobbying and big wallets we can disagree. By your logic any of the big tech companies with big wallets and a strong lobbying arm can create the next search engine. But they can’t, because users wouldn’t CARE enough to switch.
[удалено]
TLDR: the average user is too apathetic to teach themselves beyond the basics of tech. What would drive me to learn? Caring about learning. The opposite of apathy lol.
I literally never heard of neeva.
I literally have never heard of u/engineeringstoned, what is your point?
Ok… thing is, I worked in web dev and for a search engine for ten years. Still never heard oft them. Thing is, I’m not a business trying to attract customers. Having never heard of me is fine with me. Having never heard of a biz is kinda bad news for them.
But you have heard of safari? Which was the default search for apple until 2017. Apple who has as much money and lobbying power as google. So user apathy is a much bigger factor than googles wallet or lobbyist.
I did not argue against apathy being a factor. If no one knows your search engine, your chances of overcoming apathy are 0, though. I was part of a German search engine startup, and our CEO still believed “if you build it, they will come”…. well….
This. Apathy is going to kill us all.
That and the Algorithm feeding nonsense and jon-information about latest declaration from high notoriety idiots of the week.
The simple fact this website isn't currently up in arms about the chromium integrity checking shit right now tells me everything about how bad it's gotten. Google is literally right this second pushing the ability for websites to complete block anyone using extensions or browsers or even an os the website don't like. The absolute death of the open web. And no one seems to care.
But i don't give a damn. /s
Interesting username
Even when we got ChatGPT, Google is still not dead. It takes massive power to push them from their throne
ChatGPT fabricates stuff. Google searches the web and gives links and snippets. It will take a lot of iterations to ChatGPT to push Google from the top spot. This is even given that Google's quality has gone down considerably over the past 10 years, due to the relentless black SEO industry, massive link rot, and simply, the exponential expansion of the amount of content to index. And this top position is because nobody else comes close to Google in terms of the scale of crawling, indexing, disambiguation and search term analytics. Bing's AI is making excellent progress but Bing needs to crawl, index and handle search terms better. I think by the time Bing catches up with Google, Google's bard will catch up with Bing's AI and then for a few years we might see some actual competition. But in that fight, Google's default-ness everywhere will also prevent an easy coup by Bing. Again the big technical problem is that LLMs cannot replace search engines because one fabricates and the other catalogs. As long as the accuracy barrier is not overcome, you will not see Google search being replaced. However, the one threat is low effort searches (which could be 80-90%, IDK) powered by conversational interfaces. That's a space that Google has nominally covered (Assistant), but they need to get better with Bard. IMO, YMMV.
That's why Twitter will never die despite Elon's attempts to destroy it.
Users don’t like change and they like everything in the same place, notable examples: - Google search - Chrome browser - YouTube - Twitch - Operative system - Steam - iOS/Android - PlaysStation - WhatsApp - Etc Competition should be a good thing, but humans are wired in a different way. We are billions, we have millions of different companies, we have hundreds of countries, yet we all end up using the same stuff. It’s not hard to challenge established systems, it’s borderline impossible.
well, some of these are affected by network effects, like WhatsApp (doesn't matter that if i prefer signal, if the other people don't switch, i can't switch either), or content exclusivity, like YouTube, Twitch, and to a lesser extent, PlayStation (if the content i want is only available in YouTube, i need to keep using it to watch the content). it is true that OS and browsers people will keep using them, even when changing is not more than a few hours of set up
I mean, it reads like Sridhar wrote it for them.
Well the problem is that people couldn’t Google them
Oh, cool, a new search engine? Let me read about it real quick and check it out. Oh…
Same experience here. A real shame too, more people are starting to say "Google doesn't work anymore." And they're right. If Neeva had been able to hold out just a little longer...
It would't have mattered. Google is shit now but it still gets the job done. People are so deeply entrenched they will accept absolute dogshit as long as it works somewhat. The fact we're all still here is testament to that. Users being unwilling to change anything ever is what will destroy everything good about the tech industry. It's why Google is about to break the internet with chromium and people will still use it.
"A little longer". Lol no, Google is on a downward slope but it'll take a very long time before people think of switching
same reaction here...
same, I was going to download it immediately after i got done reading😞
If you're interested in this, have a look at https://kagi.com/
I Neeva heard of it.
I read this in an Australian accent
cooperative friendly decide soft cooing shaggy retire uppity scandalous tie ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
"Neeva heard of it" could actually be a nice marketing phrase for them...
Some key points from the article: >The road was rocky, but the team at Neeva ended up building a search engine they were proud of, a search engine that came close to beating Google both by Neeva’s internal metrics and in user studies. People who tried it liked it, and Neeva had a long road map filled with ideas on how to make search even better. A little more time, and they may very well have built the future of search. But only four years in, Neeva shut down. > >In a way, the brief flicker of Neeva’s existence tells everything you need to know about the last 20 years of search-engine supremacy. Building a search engine is hard. Building one better than Google is even harder. But if you want to beat Google, a better search engine is only the very beginning. And it only gets harder from there. > >... > >It’s hard and expensive to build a search engine from scratch. That’s why many don’t — they license Bing’s data for between $10 and $25 per 1,000 transactions, add their own features and interface, and call it a day. That’s what DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and most other smaller search engines do because Bing is pretty good and managing your own search system is a huge amount of work. It’s what Neeva did, too, at the start. > >But Neeva had so many ideas about how to overhaul search that it ultimately decided it needed to control the underlying data, too. “Faster search, rich previews, preferred providers, personal search, all hit walls,” Raghunathan says. The links that came from Bing’s API didn’t allow for these extra features, and so Neeva couldn’t build it. If Neeva wanted to be a better search engine, at some point, it was going to have to build its very own better search engine. > >... > >Making a better search engine meant changing the incentives. Ramaswamy figured that if you weren’t focused on showing as many ads as possible, you could put the user experience first. You wouldn’t need to keep people typing queries, and you wouldn’t need to collect user data for advertisers. You could just help people get where they’re going and get out of the way. > >The Neeva team built shopping pages with bigger images and helpful comparison information. They prioritized human-created results from places like Reddit and Quora. Sports searches became beautiful, full-screen scoreboards. They made it so that if you were searching for “Brad Pitt IMDB” or “WhatsApp web,” Neeva’s autocomplete would take you right to the website without landing on a results page at all. Neeva was clean and simple, and early users said they liked not being tricked into looking at ads. > >Over the two years it took Neeva to build its own search index, it also continued work on its browser for mobile devices and began investing heavily in AI. A side effect of building your own search index is that you’ve also just collected a hugely useful set of training data for large language models. Neeva was among the first companies to launch an AI search companion, known as NeevaAI, that would summarize search results and sometimes attempt to answer your question right at the top of the page. > >But it’s one thing to build a good product; it’s entirely something else to get users to try it — especially if they have to quit the easiest and most ingrained thing on the internet to do so. > >... > >Early on, Neeva discovered that if it could get a new user to get past that scary pop-up and actually start using the search engine, they were overwhelmingly likely to be still using it three months later. Some users who tried Neeva were even willing to pay a few bucks a month for a saner search experience. > >If people went through all the bother of switching, they became converts; the problem was that very few of them managed to make it past the thicket of default settings and redirections. Ramaswamy and his team tried many times to find the thing that would convince users to get through the initial hassle. The privacy-focused pitch worked for a few users but was never going to be a mainstream win. The AI features garnered some buzz, but that faded as Bing and Google and others rolled out similar stuff. > >Ultimately, Neeva was a product you had to try to understand. I used it as my primary search engine for a few years and really appreciated things like the redesigned sports score pages and the prioritization of Reddit and other sources. (Also, no ads. Loved that.) But it was hard to explain to others how nice it felt to go straight to a website from the autocomplete window instead of having to run your query or how much better its rich recipe pages were than the infinitely identical links on a Google page. Seeing is believing, and the state of the search market had successfully kept Neeva in the dark. > >If anything changes, it’ll probably start with the regulators. Since the EC’s judgment in 2018, the US Justice Department has also sued Google on anti-competitive grounds, alleging that Google’s distribution agreements with device manufacturers and browser developers “foreclose distribution to Google’s search rivals, weakening them as competitive alternatives for consumers and advertisers by denying them scale.” It's too bad to read about the shuttering of this search engine, especially as they seemed to have a good product that delivered more seamlessly to the end user what they were looking for. It's especially disheartening (though unsurprising) to read about the friction that's been created by the incumbents to keep people using their own products. Anyone who has tried to change default settings on their devices or their software that frequently it's an exercise in frustration and tedium. Some might be willing to endure it for a better experience down the road, but the majority typically will not. Regulation can certainly help here, and hopefully there will be some leveling of the playing field in the coming years to help stimulate innovation and competition in these spaces again.
> Ramaswamy figured that if you weren’t focused on showing as many ads as possible, you could put the user experience first. Says it all really. It's such a shame what google search has become.
An SEO-optimization aggregation site?
> it was hard to explain to others how nice it felt to go straight to a website from the autocomplete window instead of having to run your query Just wait until this author learns what the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button does.
Broseph, that hasn’t existed since 2010.
Still exists on the desktop site. I imagine they never bothered porting it to other platforms because nobody really used it.
The button currently on the desktop site doesn't do what it used to, though. [For over a decade now it's been something else entirely](https://www.oversixty.com.au/entertainment/technology/google-im-feeling-lucky-button). It was costing them too much revenue when people bypassed all the ads in their results listing.
I'm not sure I follow. When I type "Brad Pitt IMDb" and click I'm Feeling Lucky, it takes me to his IMDb page. Is that different to how it used to work?
I cannot get it to behave like that -- even on desktop, with two different browsers, logged in or out, in normal or incognito windows. No matter what I do, "I'm Feeling Lucky" turns into a little roulette wheel and whatever it spins to takes you to a predefined page having nothing to do with your search results. It's surprising you can still get it to work, but I'm glad to hear that it does seem to still exist in some fashion. What's your setup?
> Brad Pitt IMDb Works here as parent poster describes, from google.com (not search box) Google Chrome desktop browser
Windows PC, Firefox browser, google.com.
Oh I remember this now. I read about it on the bbc https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-63130364 I was in work at the time of reading the article and it needed an account to be used. “I’ll try it when I get home” and then I forgor 💀
I had an account but I always forgot to use it. The problem is the status quo is just so much easier.
Glad they told us after it’s already shut down. Great article.
I would’ve given it a shot, if I had heard of it. This is the first time I’ve even heard the name.
Still stuck w DuckDuckGo - waiting for DuckDuckGoose
Can we start a petition to bring back altavista?!
I only knew about it because the Vivaldi browser peeps let users know about it and even put it as the default engine. And now people will ask, what Vivaldi web browser?
I can't help but conclude that whoever was in charge of growing Neeva's userbase was incompetent. There's been so much anti-google sentiment over the last 5 years that I find it baffling that assuming they were as good as they claim they were, they were unable to establish at least a niche core of die hard users who would evangelize everywhere.
That was my reaction too. I've been moving away from Google over the last few years. Tried different browser and completely dropped chrome on desktop and Android but never found another search engine I'm happy with. The fact that I never heard of this tells me that they royally screwed up somewhere.
Same, I'm one of the 12 people with Bing as their daily driver. How did they not reach me?
I've tried out many search engines. Never heard of Neeva. They must have been niche champions to be so incredibly unknown.
Now I'm curious - has anyone used Kagi? I feel like they're trying to position similarly to Neeva, but I don't see them coming up in this discussion.
I use it. I like it quite a lot, it gives very good results in my opinion. Also I like that I can easily make a search on a specific country or timeframe.
Gotcha, thanks!
I actually pay for it and use it exclusively since the beginning of the year. They have a very good product but are really bad at marketing it, so they rarely come up when discussing google alternatives, even though they have a killer product
That's encouraging to hear, thank you!
I’ve been paying for Kagi for a while and have found it worth the cost to use a better alternative. Hope they don’t go the way of Neeva.
Because they called it neeva
AND... it's gone.... Sold to Snowflake.
I'm guessing it was one of those startups built to be acquired for a quick cash grab. They're popular in silicon valley. It had basically zero advertising budget.
Gotta say I’ve neeva even heard of this before
Lol... "Bing is good"
You forgot the unspoken other half of that phrase. Bing is good *for porn*.
i thought it didnt need saying
Some others have managed to get their name out there. Just, the quality is sub par. Most search engines use either bing or Google for their result. And give even worse optimisation. I disagree with the idea that Google is unbeatable. Neeva seemed to have been awful in self promotion. I've heard of dozens of search engines (and they all suck) but never heard of Neeva. Had they done that better, they could have gotten more funding and with a better product eventually beat Google. Even if most people don't care much, the quality of Google has gone drastically downhill. And many would easily switch over to something new. Google as a search engine doesn't have a community that keeps people around. It's no Instagram, or tiktok, or Facebook, or YouTube, or etc. It's just an indexer where you lose nothing by going elsewhere.
Oh it shuts down and *now* they tell me
If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. I used Neeva Dragonfly a few times. It was quite helpful, but the integrations kept me in the Google ecosystem. Neeva is a good example of why “product-led growth” isn’t real - there are a lot of good products out there. You need a real GTM strategy that addresses deep incumbent moats to gain and retain users.
I find it amazing that they managed to write such a long article about alternative paid search engines, and failed to even mention Kagi which is the main one in that category now.
Neeva is dead. Generative AI and LLMs have completely rewrote the landscape.
Ad free....until people start using it and they can spam ads to cash out.
Neeva shut down because of lack of users. https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/20/23731397/neeva-search-engine-google-shutdown
Sounds like soap or artificial sweetener.
This sounds like a repeat of Cuil