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.
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).
I’m a very happy Kagi user, the search results are way better (subjective, I know) for me, that is, I can usually find what I’m looking for in the first few entries.
I’m under the early adopter pricing but I fear that the higher price (and cognitive effort in lower prices to keep track of how many searches I’ve made) might make adoption a bit harder. I really really really don’t want Kagi to go away! I’ve shared with some friends that are also using it and even though they also reacted to the price change, they decided to stay (just like me) because of the early adopters price.
This part is totally unsolicited advice, but I find my self searching quite often for the same thing, like, my browser will remember a search instead of the domain of the thing I’m searching for (i.e. wanna go to namecheap, my browser remembers the namecheap kagi search instead of namecheap.com), maybe there could be some space to optimize repeated searches? Idk, if I’ve made a search X times the just cache it and return me the same result, don’t count that towards the total, and add a little message that the results are cached and if I want to search again click there? I know I could make bookmarks but changing behaviors is a way taller ask than caching. Anyways, best of luck and I really really hope that kagi stays afloat!
Hello, I looked at Kagi and found it too expensive. I'm a paying user for many software I use: vpn, email, git to list a few. And i am willing to pay a reasonable price for a search service. To put it in to perspective, my vpn costs less than $9 a month and I use it for high speed multimedia streaming, video games with no limits on usage. I hope you can come up with more reasonable pricing plans or consider open-sourcing the software. In which case I'll support it as a matter of principle.
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.
I was just yesterday wondering how I was going to incorporate search into my autonomous agent. I think I'm going to have to wrap an agent around Bing but if there was a cleaner option with per query pricing I'd definitely try it out. I don't see any mention of API usage on your product page, I guess you're not marketing it as a tool in that way yet?
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.
I'm a happy Neeva user and I'll miss it. I even liked the media bias feature. Tried a Google search yesterday and it was ridiculously pointless. I'm looking forward to trying your product.
Hi Vlad! Kagi subscriber here. Been thinking about this since Neeva dropped that, and I think bootstrapping is why you’re still running and they aren’t. Good luck!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had an entirely different experience. Neeva's product has been far superior to Google for me. I do wish that they invested more into isolating your search profiles; eg: one for engineering work and one for my personal life. They had this feature about halfway implemented to what I wanted. Personally I think it's like they put it, there's a massive search war going on and their tiny platform is a casualty.
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.
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].
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.
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.
I think we should stop talking about search engines (meaning "a google") as a single service, since it really isn't, but rather a series of more or less interconnected services. The notion of Internet Search is too nebulous to be able to have meaningful discussions about it.
It's much more enlightening to talk about which demand is being satisfied.
Google satisfies several disparate demands, including:
* Internet discovery
* Product discovery
* E-commerce discovery
* Brick&mortar commerce discovery
* Geographical discovery
* Fact discovery (question-answering)
All of these services have very little friction. Having a single interface helps with that, but I don't think it's a necessity. Low friction is though. Nobody wants to sign up for a service to get what google gives away ostensibly without that hassle.
It does most of these things decently well, largely thanks to being able to profile its users accurately. I don't think a competitor will replace Google by trying to copy their model and do all these things. Google is far too entrenched.
There's really no reason why you would need to compete against the combined offering of Google.
At several of these tasks, it's quite possible to outperform them. Especially in commercial discovery, there really aren't any good offerings right now. Finding the best something for the price range is frustrating, time consuming and annoying.
An LLM-based question-answering mostly satisfies the fact discovery need, not so much the others. This is of course fine, but it's important to understand that Google's killer functionality has never been answering questions, it's never been very good at that task.
Arguably, the seamless localization of the results is a much more important aspect.
"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."
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.
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.
I used Neeva for a while as my primary search engine. They had good ideas but seemed to want to do everything (poorly) instead of committing to anything in particular.
They had "spaces". They had an ability to demote (but not actually block) sites from results. They had the ability to filter results type (documentation, blog etc.), but that ability was poorly implemented. They had a half-assed browser to filter out cookies. They finally launched a Chat AI response that was slow and laughably inaccurate - searching for their CTO's name returned a nonsensical mishmash of several people's bios.
As with so many startups before them, it wasn't competition that killed them, it was the lack of focus.
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.
Too bad they chose the wrong differentiation, when Neeva launched I wrote: "if I were Neeva, I'd attempt to make search a better experience, by providing better results and context than Google does. I'd classify users according to their search history/sophistication and prefer results that other users in their class have found helpful, while at the same time making clear that the results are tailored based on their search history and offering a way to remove the class restriction. Search that uses my and other users search history to become better, in a transparent way, that's what I'd subscribe to."
http://benconrad.net/posts/200629_searchingForInformation/
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
[+] [-] freediver|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nugget|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _benj|2 years ago|reply
I’m under the early adopter pricing but I fear that the higher price (and cognitive effort in lower prices to keep track of how many searches I’ve made) might make adoption a bit harder. I really really really don’t want Kagi to go away! I’ve shared with some friends that are also using it and even though they also reacted to the price change, they decided to stay (just like me) because of the early adopters price.
This part is totally unsolicited advice, but I find my self searching quite often for the same thing, like, my browser will remember a search instead of the domain of the thing I’m searching for (i.e. wanna go to namecheap, my browser remembers the namecheap kagi search instead of namecheap.com), maybe there could be some space to optimize repeated searches? Idk, if I’ve made a search X times the just cache it and return me the same result, don’t count that towards the total, and add a little message that the results are cached and if I want to search again click there? I know I could make bookmarks but changing behaviors is a way taller ask than caching. Anyways, best of luck and I really really hope that kagi stays afloat!
[+] [-] kovac|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sintezcs|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omegant|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] marban|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinco|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emrah|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theonlybutlet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dehrmann|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marymkearney|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wellthisisgreat|2 years ago|reply
The pay for use model for search is refreshing. I hope the economics work out
[+] [-] djbusby|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TradingPlaces|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seventytwo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yablak|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StockHuman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] data-abuse|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onetokeoverthe|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jessfyi|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dehrmann|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] repeekad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodah|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usaar333|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zak|2 years ago|reply
This is the first time I've heard of Neeva.
[+] [-] collaborative|2 years ago|reply
In fact, HN is a rara avis in that it allows "Show HN" posts
[+] [-] NoPicklez|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m-i-l|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/neeva
[1] https://www.protocol.com/neeva-search
[+] [-] tpmx|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] oars|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nologic01|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mg|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|2 years ago|reply
It's much more enlightening to talk about which demand is being satisfied.
Google satisfies several disparate demands, including:
* Internet discovery
* Product discovery
* E-commerce discovery
* Brick&mortar commerce discovery
* Geographical discovery
* Fact discovery (question-answering)
All of these services have very little friction. Having a single interface helps with that, but I don't think it's a necessity. Low friction is though. Nobody wants to sign up for a service to get what google gives away ostensibly without that hassle.
It does most of these things decently well, largely thanks to being able to profile its users accurately. I don't think a competitor will replace Google by trying to copy their model and do all these things. Google is far too entrenched.
There's really no reason why you would need to compete against the combined offering of Google.
At several of these tasks, it's quite possible to outperform them. Especially in commercial discovery, there really aren't any good offerings right now. Finding the best something for the price range is frustrating, time consuming and annoying.
An LLM-based question-answering mostly satisfies the fact discovery need, not so much the others. This is of course fine, but it's important to understand that Google's killer functionality has never been answering questions, it's never been very good at that task.
Arguably, the seamless localization of the results is a much more important aspect.
[+] [-] impulser_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tikkun|2 years ago|reply
"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."
[+] [-] shortformblog|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DerekBickerton|2 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] vinaypai|2 years ago|reply
They had "spaces". They had an ability to demote (but not actually block) sites from results. They had the ability to filter results type (documentation, blog etc.), but that ability was poorly implemented. They had a half-assed browser to filter out cookies. They finally launched a Chat AI response that was slow and laughably inaccurate - searching for their CTO's name returned a nonsensical mishmash of several people's bios.
As with so many startups before them, it wasn't competition that killed them, it was the lack of focus.
[+] [-] jweir|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dopeboy|2 years ago|reply
* 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.
[+] [-] bcon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intellectronica|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmaunder|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] amadeuspagel|2 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] kartayyar|2 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] rg111|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] dotcoma|2 years ago|reply
Curious to see what Neeva’s next move will be.