[HN Gopher] Neeva Announces Public Availability of Its Ads Free,...
___________________________________________________________________
Neeva Announces Public Availability of Its Ads Free, Private Search
Engine
Author : nmwnmw
Score : 117 points
Date : 2021-06-29 13:21 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (neeva.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (neeva.com)
| osipovas wrote:
| Looks like they're doing some sort of geo-filtering. I wasn't
| able to sign up from Canada.
| donmcronald wrote:
| Same. I rarely give out my email address for a waitlist, but
| the "Prefer More" screenshot showing that you can influence the
| rank of individual sites is a feature I've wanted in search for
| ages. There are so many sites I'd like to delete from the
| internet when I search with Google / Bing.
| altacc wrote:
| Same here in Europe. That's probably a good thing for them as
| it looks very US focused for now (as many products are), so
| providing a lesser service to users outside their currently
| active markets prevents bad user experience & bad reviews. I
| won't hold my breath waiting for it to hit Scandinavia.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| tldr; This appears to be run by 4 ex-googlers, see bottom of >
| https://neeva.com/
| zorrolovsky wrote:
| I agree with others that a new business model for search is
| refreshing. But... for a privacy-oriented service, Neeva is doing
| a poor job in earning my trust.
|
| I spent some minutes in their website and all I could find are
| vague promises and grandiose marketing-speak. Where's the
| evidence and the technical detail? Where are the privacy experts,
| data experts and engineers impressing me with the robustness,
| openness and cleverness of their system?
|
| Mullvad, for example, excels at explaining how their privacy
| service works. They transparently explain how they designed a
| systen with privacy at the core and they're open in their
| processes and code. They're also independently audited. That's
| why I trust them.
|
| Neeva, on the other hand, focusses on promises and not evidence.
| Also, when you scratch the surface they no longer seem so
| privacy-friendly.
|
| Just compare the privacy policies of both companies and make your
| own judgement about who is truly privacy-oriented or not:
|
| https://neeva.com/privacy https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-
| data-policy/#numbered https://mullvad.net/en/help/privacy-policy/
|
| In regards to Neeva's positioning as 'private search', I don't
| think they have their architecture right. The best privacy-
| oriented services are keen on NOT knowing users. Neeva seems keen
| on getting their hands on all sorts of data. For users: Create an
| account, send payment data, sync with documents, email,
| calendars, etc. For users and non-users: automatic hoarding of
| IP, user settings, location, etc.
| 1024core wrote:
| Their "privacy promise" page https://neeva.com/digital-bill-of-
| rights talks a lot, but doesn't say much about what _they_ do.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Because their business model is likely hype than actually
| delivering what they promise. Might as well use Duck Duck Go if
| they can't actually differentiate their platform in any aspect
| aside from marketing terms.
| jacobmarble wrote:
| I have been using Neeva for several weeks. It took a while to
| stop my eyes from scanning past "the fold" in search results. The
| useful stuff is right there at the top. I can't say enough good
| about my experience thus far.
|
| I had a concern about search latency, so I emailed Sridhar at
| ceo@neeva.co and he replied in a few hours. We had a nice chat
| via email. Now I have a mug and a T-shirt.
|
| I'm looking forward to paying $5/mo to be a customer, and not a
| product. Would happily pay $20/mo -- this is worth more to me
| than subscriptions like Netflix.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| > Would happily pay $20/mo -- this is worth more to me than
| subscriptions like Netflix.
|
| I think I am on board with this thinking! The value provided by
| effective search is HUGE, way more than me binging on Netflix!
| kesslern wrote:
| I've been part of the beta for a few months now. It's overall
| pretty good. I'm on the fence about paying $5/mo for it, but
| I'll probably do it for awhile at least.
|
| My biggest gripes are the Yelp and maps integrations. When I
| search for local restaurants or locations, the Neeva map
| integration rarely finds what I want. When it does, I see Yelp
| reviews which I regard as complete trash.
|
| Incognito mode is also annoying on my phone. Since I'm not
| logged I can't search with Neeva which is my default search
| provider.
|
| On the plus side, it generally gives better programming search
| results. I'm a big fan of the "official documentation" filter.
|
| My ultimate hope is that Neeva is eventually able to crawl
| self-hosted services and return them in my search results. For
| example, I have all my recipes in a self-hosted Bookstack
| instance and I'd love a search for "taco seasoning" to come up
| with the recipe I saved.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| For those who have joined, I'm curious about the following query:
|
| Are women better than men at limbo?
|
| The results on Google[0] and Bing[1] are both entirely useless
| clickbait. I just want to know if women can bend back farther
| than men without falling over.
|
| 0. https://www.middleendian.com/limbogoogle.png
|
| 1. https://www.middleendian.com/limbobing.png
| dekhn wrote:
| What do you want out of this query (yes, the SERPs are pretty
| bad)? I rewrote the query to [ who is best at limbo ] and got a
| much better result from Google.
|
| But as soon as you add 'gender' to the query it switches to
| articles about being in 'gender limbo' which is't totally
| surprising.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Yeah those results are better, and it's clear that the best
| limboer is a woman who can apparently limbo under a car lol.
|
| I just wish the standard results weren't such irrelevant
| junk.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Please update this title to reflect that "public availability"
| actually means a "3 month free trial".
| azinman2 wrote:
| Public doesn't mean it's free. Public means it's out if beta.
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| "Sign up and get three months free, then only $4.95 per month."
| Y_Y wrote:
| I can't believe this, but I may have reached the point where
| I'd be willing to pay for search that isn't shit.
| analognoise wrote:
| I'd pay just to get the old Google Books search back the way
| it used to be. I'd pay just for that.
| Animats wrote:
| I think I just figured out their business plan. They want to
| be acquired by Apple or Amazon and have their service bundled
| with something else you pay for.
|
| "Amazon Prime Search", anyone?
| donmcronald wrote:
| Oddly I was thinking the same thing. If it de-ranks sites
| with a lot of affiliate links I might do it. Most of my
| searches on Google and Bing result in affiliate advertiser
| blog spam. It's terrible.
| azinman2 wrote:
| What's strange to me is that they're featuring "best X" in all
| these difference shots, yet their experience I still don't think
| does a great job. Best at what? According to whom and why? What
| is the priority list?
|
| The headphones graphic is a great example of that. We have over
| the ear headphones next to in-ear AirPods, serving likely
| different markets with different needs often at different price
| points. Their example with best mattress is from a very limited
| perspective; my fancy McRoskey mattress doesn't show, yet I could
| easily argue that's a top 5 mattress. It's also out of most
| peoples price ranges and availability... but it really is one of
| the best (if all your care about is quality).
|
| I have the same experience with Yelp. All these 5 star reviews
| projecting many dimensions from wildly different perspectives and
| expectations onto a single dimension as an average.
|
| I'd love to see an honest attempt at either personalization or at
| least some kind of deeper analysis/tooling that lets me explore
| the set of possibilities. Do I value ambiance? Newness? Service?
| Location? Social experience? Price? Who are these people
| reviewing things and do their aesthetics resemble mine? There are
| way better experiences possible out there.
| m-i-l wrote:
| To put it another way, how do we know that the "expert
| recommended shopping results" won't be any different from paid
| adverts? Or that when they "share at least 20% of our topline
| revenue with content creator partners when their content is
| used to directly answer a Neeva user's query" they won't create
| a new form of spamdexing where the objective is a cut of the
| 20% rather than clicks on pages filled with adverts?
| dannywarner wrote:
| I tried signing up a few weeks ago and they are not allowing
| international or Australian access.
|
| I'm surprised the comments here are missing the elephant in the
| room.
|
| Sridhar Ramaswamy was the Google executive directly responsible
| for putting all those ads on Google's search results. If Google
| search got broken then I reckon he did more than anyone to break
| it. He had a brutal rivalry with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.
|
| Vivek Raghunathan put all the ads on YouTube. Those ads are so
| bad Google makes money from people paying to remove them.
|
| They left Google after a scandal with YouTube showing ads on
| videos that exploited young children and appealed to pedophiles.
|
| Are the architects of the problem the right people to trust for a
| solution? The born-again anti-advertising schtick just seems too
| clever by half. They are collecting more private personal data
| than Google ever did.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com.au/google-exec-sridhar-ramas...
|
| https://camilancumicumi.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-former-google...
| judge2020 wrote:
| > Those ads are so bad Google makes money from people paying to
| remove them.
|
| Arguably those ads have to be that annoying if people want to
| use YouTube for free, at least in its current state - it's a
| globally free service that receives 500 hours of content every
| minute[0]. Less annoying ads drive less clicks and thus
| generate less revenue. Paying to remove them is a sign that you
| actually value YT for how much it costs to run.
|
| 0: https://blog.youtube/press/
| dzonga wrote:
| search is now so prevalent and necessary, and likewise browser
| engines n OS's. These things should be 100% funded by a common
| fund contributed to by all governments with a steering committee.
| Like a UN but for technology.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Can you test the search results without signing up?
| peauts wrote:
| no but it just needs an email to try it
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| If this is as accurate as Google was ~2008 but without the ads, I
| will have to seriously consider paying for the service.
|
| Mostly because my time is valuable and I support the alignment of
| user interests with product interests
| fezzez wrote:
| I gave it a try a while ago and it looked like their search
| results come from bing like duckduckgo.
| chewmieser wrote:
| I'm not sure about that but they do have their own crawler so
| they're at least trying not to rely on Bing (if they do at
| all).
|
| https://neeva.com/neevabot
| sct202 wrote:
| Last year when they announced they said they were using
| Bing: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/technology/google-
| neeva-e...
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| they have their own cralwers too
| m-i-l wrote:
| Also from last year: "rather than try to build a search
| infrastructure from scratch, Neeva instead opted to use
| Bing's search API for its basic result"[0]. I thought
| that was a huge missed opportunity because you could
| build a pretty good search index of your own from scratch
| with $77.5M[1] in funding. But it wasn't clear if that
| was their plan for the long term.
|
| [0] https://www.protocol.com/neeva-search
|
| [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/neeva
| [deleted]
| gentleman11 wrote:
| > Created by ex-Google execs
|
| Do you worry about any non compete or nondisclosure risks?
| dekhn wrote:
| The folks who started this company and the folks who funded it
| did this due diligence many years ago. It's pretty clear Google
| is OK with this. Furthermore, if Google isn't OK with this,
| they're going to be locked in a battle with people who operated
| Google previously and know all of Google's tricks.
|
| More importantly, Google knows they have to stay away because
| otherwise they are just making the fed's argument they are a
| monopoly.
| yumraj wrote:
| California has no non-compete.
| [deleted]
| chx wrote:
| This creeps me out. Connect Google, Slack and Github together for
| one search experience? That's an incredible lot of trust. Where
| does all that data go? Shadowy markets?
| nickserv wrote:
| Is this a case of "it takes a thief to catch one"? Because
| looking at who is behind this, they seem to have more experience
| in abusing (rather than protecting) privacy and user rights.
|
| https://neeva.com/about
| mottosso wrote:
| Can you expand on this?
| diggernet wrote:
| I expect nickserv was talking about all the Googlers in the
| founders and investors lists. But this bit in particular
| really jumped out at me, for a company making a big deal
| about its add-free purity:
|
| "Neeva was founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at
| Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at
| YouTube)"
|
| I can't help but wonder what clause there might be in the
| user contract (with teeth) that would prevent a future pivot
| or buyout or redefinition of the "Digital Bill of Rights"
| after all that juicy user data has been collected.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" Neeva was founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at
| Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at
| YouTube)"_
| rank0 wrote:
| I am always excited to hear about disruption in search. I would
| absolutely pay for a private search engine provided the results
| are useful!
|
| But how can I be confident that neeva will not misuse my data? If
| I hook up my accounts to this service, I've gotta trust neeva
| with all the same information that google would have.
|
| Is it possible to provide search functionality with only open
| source client side logic? This is in regards to the gmail,
| GitHub, slack integration. Now that would grab my attention!
| yumraj wrote:
| Genuine question: I use DDG which also touts privacy and is free.
| Yes it shows ads, I'm told they are non tracking.
|
| What benefit does Neeva provide over it?
| james_pm wrote:
| You can very easily turn off ads in DDG from Settings.
| s3r3nity wrote:
| I think it's just another monetization model and another
| competitor overall in the space.
|
| If you like the privacy of DDG but really don't like ads, you
| can pay Neeva a monthly fee for a similar experience.
|
| Doesn't have to be winner-take-all - there's enough space in
| the market for both models to do well, and more competition
| will keep each of them honest in their value props to users.
| yumraj wrote:
| Yes, I get that. I was curious if there were other
| differences.
|
| For example DDG uses bing I think, does Neeva do their own
| indexing?
| alphabetatheta wrote:
| Neeva is trying to do better than Bing. Also, Neeva does
| not do ads.
| proxyforce wrote:
| Another interesting difference (that I personally find to
| be one of the best features in Neeva) is the ability to
| connect apps. You can then search not only the public
| web, but also private data from your Slack, Github,
| Gdrive, Jira (etc) accounts. We're hard at work adding
| more integrations in the near future as well.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Neeva
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| Is there plans for students? (I guess you might not have
| any inputs on the pricing model)
|
| Students (especially CSstudents) being exposed to this
| ahead will probably help them in and these are the kind
| of demographics that would pay for a search engine.
| dekhn wrote:
| Reminds me of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop
| varunjain99 wrote:
| With ad monetization, search engines have an incentive for you
| to click on ads. This makes it less likely that you find the
| highest quality information for your needs.
|
| In what ways is your experience degraded? You may click on an
| ad result at the top of the page, while the more useful result
| is somewhere down below. You may become constantly frustrated
| by having to scroll past ads that are dominating huge portions
| of search result pages.
|
| But the problem goes beyond whether or not ads are present at
| the top of the page. Ad-monetized search engines may hesitate
| to present organic, non-ad-based results in ways that are easy
| for you to digest -- doing so might make it less likely that
| you click on an ad result! For example, if you're doing a
| shopping query, say for "best air purifiers", the search engine
| may hesitate to show you an easy-to-use UI with expert reviews,
| price history, and different possible air purifier feature
| sets. Showing such a "flashy UI" will make it less likely that
| you engage with ad results.
|
| At Neeva, we're trying to bring you the highest quality
| information for your needs, no longer held back by ads. We want
| to present this information to you in easily digestible and
| transparent ways. And we want to give you more control over
| your search results with personalization.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm a Neeva engineer.
| nickreese wrote:
| The main problem with search today is the lack of organically
| appearing "curation" found on the early internet.
|
| Today everyone knows the value of a link, so it curation via
| links doesn't happen organically any more like it used to... yet
| this is still a major/the primary part of Google's Search
| results.
|
| Until the "curation problem" is solved I am not hopeful of a
| search engine producing excellent results like Google did before
| 2010.
|
| Stoked to try this out, but teaching a machine to curate is hard.
| bitcurious wrote:
| That's a great observation.
|
| An idea for curation:
|
| Content evaluated by usefulness towards solving some problem.
| Perhaps measured by its usefulness towards training a very
| narrow AI. Like what if AlphaGo's only inputs were web pages on
| the topic of Go, and there were hundreds of instances of it all
| trained on different combinations of web pages, and competing
| against each other.
|
| Probably the data<>contest mapping is itself intractable until
| we have AGI, at which point the whole question might be moot.
| But what it?
| wayneftw wrote:
| There's no way to register this as the default search engine in
| iOS Safari.
|
| Anyone know which iOS browsers give you the freedom to do this?
| bkallus wrote:
| Firefox for iOS lets you set any search engine you want.
| _benj wrote:
| I just made an account with neeva and it seems likt they have
| their own browser for iOS, quiet likely just a thing wrapper
| around safari but with their search engine integrated.
|
| It seems to me that if neeva just had an open url to do
| searches it wouldn't really have a way to track registrations
| unless there's some complicated process of generating a unique
| search URL with a token or something...
| twodayslate wrote:
| It doesn't seem possible. Without integration into my devices
| this seems like a non-starter for me. I don't want an app just
| for search.
| jacobmarble wrote:
| I use Neeva with Firefox on iOS.
| proxyforce wrote:
| Some browsers on iOS (like Chrome and Firefox) will let you
| configure Neeva to be the default search engine. We also have
| our own iOS browser app that you can check out as well:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/neeva-browser-search-
| engine/id....
|
| Disclaimer: I'm an engineer working on Neeva.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-06-29 23:01 UTC)