[nugget]

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).

[usaar333]

> Neeva failed because they didn’t understand distribution

No, the team and its VCs fully understood distribution.

Neeva never got to the point of having a compelling enough product where cost of user aq was below LTV for a large enough market.

[mi_lk]

Yea, distribution > product (most of the time) is almost startup 101 these days. It's dismissive to think the team and its big-name VCs behind it don't know the importance of distribution

[MichaelZuo]

Wasn't Stripe mostly word-of-mouth, with quite little money spent, until recently?

[quickthrower2]

Not best product. The only product. IMO altavista and yahoo were so far behind they were hopeless, relying on unchanged habits and noisy news.

[giantrobot]

Yahoo never had great search, they started life as a directory rather than a full search engine. Their first search functionality only searched their directory. Later they used Inktomi's crawler based search.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

Alltheweb was good

[Cockbrand]

Indeed, they had an excellent search back then. But in a world before auto-complete in the URL bar, I wondered why they hadn't come up with a shorter and more catchy name. I usually was just too lazy to type "alltheweb.com", and I always had to think for a second to remember the URL in the first place.

[dehrmann]

You're talking about being the default search engine in Firefox and Safari, right?

[EscapeFromNY]

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...

[kyrra]

Sundar was the lead PM on Chrome (before it even released).

[nugget]

Toolbar, Chrome, other software partnerships and many enterprise search deals besides Firefox and Safari.