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by jessfyi 1119 days ago
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.
4 comments
dehrmann 1118 days ago
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.

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repeekad 1119 days ago
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.
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kodah 1118 days ago
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.
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usaar333 1118 days ago
neeva.xyz was a spin-off. I don't think it is affected by this shut down.
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