[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) - Simple search across all...
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Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) - Simple search across all your apps
Hi HN, we're Max and James, co-founders of Needl
(https://www.needl.tech). Needl is a single search bar for all your
apps that lets you find any document, message, or file you need.
Here's a demo video:
https://www.loom.com/share/652ae56c8ee34bc2a84b8aacf479a9f4. We've
all struggled to find information and couldn't remember if it was
shared over Gmail or Slack or Notion. Most of us have hundreds of
thousands of emails, documents, messages, etc., and only a small
fraction are actually useful. Internal search is even harder than
web search in some ways: with web search, there are dozens of right
answers and millions of previous searches to train ranking models,
but internally (i.e. on your own data), there is only one right
answer and limited training data. Needl's value prop is twofold:
it unifies all of your information together and provides better
search than existing platforms (here's an example of Needl compared
to Gmail: https://imgur.com/a/3ZX8f8Q). Together, these save time
by giving you exactly what you need. Recently we also launched a
personal assistant that gives direct answers to any search. Simply
ask, "What's the budget for our 2023 team offsite?" or "When's my
next flight to SF and what's the confirmation #?" From your web
apps, we'll generate the exact answer you need. (pro tip, you don't
even have to phrase it as a question). To rank results on Needl,
we combine text matching, semantic search, and platform-specific
usage patterns (e.g. email opens). Semantic search (based on user
intent / meaning) has helped us solve the hard problem of internal
search - everyone has a different vernacular and way of
organization. We use LLMs to create embeddings and then use vector
search to allow greater breadth of results over traditional text-
based search. Our search (and generative answers) even works well
in different languages, something that surprised us. To give
generated answers to questions, we take the first results on Needl
and run them through GPT-3 and use an engineered version of the
user's query to prompt GPT-3 accordingly. It's similar to what
Phind.com (Hello Cognition) and Perplexity.ai do with web search.
Using LLMs to build relationships between documents for search and
recommendation was a remnant of our failed college startup. We had
built a "TikTok for blog posts" that recommended user-written
content based on their interactions with other posts. We quickly
found out social media moderation was a nightmare (who would've
thought) and few people enjoy reading any more. It wasn't until we
threw in the white flag and went to our full-time jobs -- James as
a SWE at Microsoft and me in investment banking at Moelis -- that
we realized that recommendation + search was the real product. At
my job in particular, intranet search was unusable. The primary way
people "searched" for information was by sending company-wide
e-mail blasts asking if anyone had materials about an industry or
company! This got us wondering why internal search sucked so badly
and led us down the path of building Needl. Obviously with a
product like this, privacy is the #1 concern for users. Some
companies have solved this concern by going local first, but that
involves significant reduction in quality of search, because LLMs
can't be run locally. We went the opposite route: users' entire
index is stored on the cloud. We know that's not for everyone, but
the results it enables are significantly more powerful, and we make
clear commitments to our users: (1) we never access users' personal
information without explicit permission; (2) all information is
encrypted both in transit and at rest, and (3) we will never sell
users' information. We've gotten SOC 2 Type II compliant to give
our users assurances about the way their data is being handled and
our dedication to information security. Setting up Needl takes
less than 3 minutes--users create an account, grant read access to
the platforms they want to search through (Slack, Notion, GSuite,
etc.), and we index their information. Once completed, you have
instant, cross-platform search in a Spotlight-esque format--control
+ space opens Needl from anywhere. In terms of pricing, Needl is
free for up to 3 integrations and $10/month for unlimited
integrations. To learn more, you can download and set up Needl at
https://www.needl.tech/. If you've already tried tools in this
space, we'd love to hear your experience and what you care about
most. We look forward to everyone's comments!
Author : MaxKeenan
Score : 62 points
Date : 2023-01-31 17:36 UTC (5 hours ago)
| zarathustra333 wrote:
| I really love the product. Would you be open to hiring an intern
| to work on the technical aspect but also dabble with the product?
| Im currently a 3rd year CS + Philosophy student in NYC. If its
| something you'd consider can I have your email and ill reach out
| with some more info about myself.
| mtmail wrote:
| They have an email address on their website.
| theolivenbaum wrote:
| Welcome to the space - I'm one of the founders from
| https://curiosity.ai! It's crazy how much movement there is
| recently, with Slapdash (now part of ClickUp), Command-E (sold to
| Dropbox), Raycast and many others, seems like the quest for the
| one search is still pretty much alive!
|
| Really interesting to see how you're integrating LLMs - something
| we've been curious to play with (but not yet feasible on-device
| as our app indexes everything locally).
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Certainly a very lively space, feels like just about everyone
| is trying to solve the problem at hand. Always happy to share
| thoughts / learnings in the space -- we should find a time to
| connect, feel free to email me at max@needl.tech
| theolivenbaum wrote:
| Awesome, dropped you an email - let's find some time to catch
| up over some virtual beers!
| aloukissas wrote:
| How is this different than Dropbox Dash (formerly known as
| Command-E)? What I love about Dash is that no metadata/index
| leaves my computer - are you taking the same approach?
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| We went the opposite route: users' entire index is stored on
| the cloud. We know that's not for everyone, but the search
| results it enables are significantly more powerful, and we make
| clear commitments to our users: (1) we never access users'
| personal information without explicit permission; (2) all
| information is encrypted both in transit and at rest, and (3)
| we will never sell users' information. We've gotten SOC 2 Type
| II compliant to give our users assurances about the way their
| data is being handled and our dedication to information
| security.
| aloukissas wrote:
| Got it. FWIW, the search experience with command-e has been
| fantastic and super powerful since the beta, so I'm not sure
| how much more powerful this is to require me to leak all my
| info to the cloud. It'd be hard to believe it's a 10x
| improvement e.g.
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Cool to hear Command E search has improved a lot -- it's
| good for the space generally. Curious what platforms you're
| searching mostly on -- for the majority of Needl users
| their information is already on the cloud (granted a
| startup having your data is different than Google).
|
| We've also found searching messaging platforms (Gmail /
| Slack) and the generative aspect to be the most difficult.
| Finding links to docs that you know the title of is less
| challenging. So if you just use Command E for Dropbox /
| Drive / Local, then it's almost certainly the right
| solution for you.
| evantahler wrote:
| How do you compre to https://slapdash.com?
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Biggest difference is search quality. Our entire product is
| focused on making information more accessible across web apps.
| We have generative Q&A search and semantic search, something
| Slapdash does not offer (to my understanding).
|
| On the other side, we also don't offer the Command Bar-esque
| features that Slapdash and Raycast offer. For now, our #1 focus
| is search and search alone.
| jamesmcintyre wrote:
| Needl looks really cool, congrats on the launch!
|
| Wondering if you could speak on a few topics in the spirit of
| hacker news / yc community:
|
| 1. Wondering if you've run into any friction yet where employers
| block the end-user from integrating with their apps? Just curious
| to what level that is or is not a common practice for enterprise
| users?
|
| 2. After using previous products that promise similar "search
| across all apps" functionality I soon felt the early
| excitement/novelty wear off and returned to old behaviors (ie,
| searching using each app's search). No doubt this is just a
| testament to how hard new habits are to build (and the old to let
| go of) but I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the human
| behavior / psychological aspect of products that have
| characteristics like this? As a tangential example, recent blogs
| posts featured on HN talked about how perhaps a chat-gpt
| conversational interface is not actually ideal to replace various
| UI/UX as it may take more cognitive overhead for the user to
| think of how to describe what they want when normally the UI/UX
| is what previously assisted them to arrive at that data.
| Basically I'm wondering how congruent (to existing behaviors) or
| novel your UX is and to what extent you believe this presents
| challenges to your team when designing (and perhaps marketing)
| the product?
|
| 3. Can you speak on your YC journey?
|
| Thanks and good luck!
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| To the first point -- certainly some friction here. In most
| cases the employee is able to integrate the app and flags arise
| to IT after the fact. Then the employee connects us with IT and
| we resolve the issue by going through a security questionnaire
| / showing our SOC II. The majority of our current users are
| SMBs, where they don't have significant IT oversight, we're one
| of the few products in the space that's truly self-serve.
|
| To the second -- very good point and something we continue to
| experiment with. Our basic thesis is -- if your search is
| really good, people will learn to default to your app. For many
| of our users, the unification is less so the value and more so
| the better search quality, especially compared to Gmail and
| GDrive. Another good point that writing things as a question is
| often a worse user experience than just using Google search
| esque terminology. For our Ask Needl feature, you can still get
| value without writing an entire question. Ex: website total
| budget --> $1000-1500.
|
| Our YC journey was certainly formative. Much of the advice
| given was counter-intuitive in the bull market of Nov 21 when
| everyone was spending and growing as fast as possible. My
| biggest takeaway was the focus on solving hard problems with
| small teams and only caring about what your users think of you.
| Would highly recommend - the culture is unparalleled.
| drchiu wrote:
| Good luck on your launch!
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Hey Max! Great seeing you launch here, congrats :)
| ushakov wrote:
| How does your product compare to https://haystack.it?
| nativeit wrote:
| Here at Haystack, we provide an industry leading cross-platform
| application to help obfuscate, disguise, and confuse your data
| that increases security by decreasing its ability to be found
| in a search.
| yuvalsteuer wrote:
| Hi I'm Yuval, one of the devs behind haystack, I messed around
| with needl + other alternatives (e.g unleash, getcommande,
| glean).
|
| I talked to Max as a user over needls privacy policy.
|
| The biggest difference is that haystack gives you search
| results relevant to your query. Just like google.
|
| needl and alts are more of a spotlight/raycast alternative,
| great as a productivity tool, they require you to know exactly
| what you're looking for beforehand, in my opinion which leaves
| more to be desired as a search product.
|
| Another big differencee is around data privacy, haystack is
| open, free and most importantly self-hosted.
|
| Also we allow building low code custom data connectors into
| haystack!
|
| It'll become publicly available next month here:
|
| https://github.com/haystackoss/haystack
|
| Thanks :)
| ushakov wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Having just looked at the data, it's pretty clear to me
| that this entire exchange was fake. We ban accounts that do
| that. Please don't do it again.
|
| It's particularly uncool that you're doing this, given the
| number of times that you posted at length accusing us
| (falsely) of nefarious actions in moderating this site.
|
| Btw, I took special care to make sure that your own startup
| got a nice amount of exposure on HN, despite the fact that
| the posts were obviously ringvoted. We make a point of not
| holding grudges and try to make sure that good, interesting
| content gets seen. But please stop using manipulative
| promotional tactics either for your own stuff or your
| friends.
| moneywoes wrote:
| So he made a fake account to ask the question then
| replied with his original account?
| dang wrote:
| No, I meant that (assuming I'm reading the data
| correctly) the exchange was orchestrated and not at all
| organic.
|
| I don't normally post publicly about these things but
| when people try to mess with another startup's launch
| thread, it gets my goat (YC-related or not), and to use
| manipulative tactics while doing it goes over my
| threshold for saying something.
| yuvalsteuer wrote:
| I'm not sure of the data, I was linked this by a friend,
| I'm not really sure how a proprietary saas company ends
| up as the good guy, while we're trying to ensure the next
| big search platform remains open, end up as thugs.
|
| It seems the main mods problem with what I did is
| plugging our github url, which made it obvious I diverted
| attention from needl's launch, mistake I made. I'm not
| deleting any comments, because I prefer context to mod
| interactions stand in broad daylight.
|
| I'm truely sorry, I like this forum, mods here are
| awesome.
| dang wrote:
| Don't worry! as long it doesn't happen again, it doesn't
| need to be a problem.
|
| Obviously I can't know what happened off the site, but to
| judge by what I'm looking at in the data at our end, this
| exchange was obviously not organic, nor was this the
| first evidence of collusion that I found.
| [deleted]
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Not familiar enough with them to say -- doesn't seem to be
| publicly available.
| searchableguy wrote:
| The core idea is similar to usefyi which pivoted to nira, an
| access/authorization monitoring service. Here is a thread on why
| they made the pivot.
|
| https://twitter.com/hnshah/status/1399773415213436934
|
| How is needle different?
|
| Are you also competing with various ctrl + K spotlight
| competitors, many funded by YC like raycast?
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, definitely familiar with Usefyi -- them and
| Daniel Gross' Cue really set the stage for this space. In our
| mind, the biggest limitation for internal search is search
| quality, something that is becoming more and more improvable
| with LLM development
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Immediate intention is to not compete with Raycast and the
| like. Search itself is a too difficult problem to also go
| down the path of fully replacing Spotlight.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Thanks for the answers. I wish you have a successful
| launch.
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Thank you!
| [deleted]
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Is there a way to switch between "All", "Files", "Messages", etc.
| using the keyboard? I'd like to be able to quickly filter the
| search results when I know what kind of thing I'm searching for.
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Really good point -- will definitely add in the next few days.
| What hotkey are you thinking of? My immediate first thought is
| tab -- think that would work well for you?
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Yes, tab is what I instinctively reached for. That seems to
| be the intuition.
| jeeyoungk wrote:
| I always found this class of product fascinating, as new ones pop
| up all the time. I remember...
|
| * Google Desktop
|
| * Grepline / Cue (this is W10)
|
| * ... various other products ...
|
| I feel like for personal users, the product ultimately isn't
| sticky enough.
|
| However, "enterprise search" feel more viable path especially
| this is where it becomes more valuable (and where the money is).
| Also anybody whose working at a large company would need to have
| some enterprise procurements to sign up for such a service
| anyway. I'm talking about players like Glean in this area.
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Good point. It's interesting because, in many ways, search is
| easier at the enterprise level than the individual level. The
| usage patterns & social graphs of large orgs is incredibly
| helpful for relevance ranking. For example, if someone on your
| team just accessed a doc, the odds you are looking for that doc
| are pretty high.
|
| Our thesis is that Google Desktop + Cue and the dozens of
| others lacked was good enough search to be sticky. We're not
| entirely certain this is the only reason, but we're testing it
| out.
| yuvalsteuer wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Please stop hijacking another startup's launch thread. You've
| already posted elsewhere in the thread, and that part was
| pretty obviously a fake, staged conversation. Not cool. (In
| case anyone's wondering, yes, this is just as not-cool whether
| the startup is YC funded or not, and I've posted such scoldings
| in such threads in the past.)
|
| Manipulative tactics like voting rings and staged comments are
| not ok on HN--this is in both the site guidelines
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and the FAQ
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) so please don't do
| those things again.
|
| You already had a nice and prominent Show HN for your own
| startup just a few weeks ago--one which, by the way, we helped
| out by putting it in the second chance pool
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).
|
| (We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34599406.)
| yuvalsteuer wrote:
| Was not my intention at all, sunlight is the best
| disinfectant.
|
| I'm not saying you're accusing me of anything, but what
| _would_ be a fair comment in you 're eyes, I'll be happy to
| learn.
| dang wrote:
| What would be fairest is to let a competing startup have
| their launch thread without trying to interfere with it.
| Each startup deserves its own day in the sun.
|
| If you're going to post, you certainly shouldn't do it more
| than once.
|
| Replying in multiple places to change the subject to your
| own promotion is in bad taste, and orchestrating exchanges
| with seemingly-unrelated other users is an outright abuse
| and the sort of thing we ban accounts for if they do it
| repeatedly.
| ushakov wrote:
| Just to make it clear: I'm not involved in Haystack. I
| commented here and shared a link on their discord, so
| someone from their team could have an opportunity to
| answer
|
| By the way, thank for helping our own startup, we are
| really grateful for all the attention and encouragement
| we have received from HN community
|
| My apologies to you, Max and James. This is not how I
| expected things to turn out
| yuvalsteuer wrote:
| My bad, thanks for letting me know.
|
| I tend to see Needl as peers, not competition, sometimes
| peers behave in bad taste.
| [deleted]
| moneywoes wrote:
| What does the prompt injection look like, how do you prevent
| hallucination
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| We've experimented with this a fair bit, very low occurrence of
| the model making up facts when the answer exists within a
| document, but users have reported outside information (general
| knowledge) being shown in their results.
|
| We essentially just prompt GPT-3 to ignore everything that is
| outside of the chunks of information we provide it.
| kmos17 wrote:
| Congrats on your launch, looks like a very useful tool!
|
| Although I have to say the privacy implications are quite
| concerning before I'd consider using it personally or for a team.
|
| You mention at rest encryption, how does that work with indexing
| the data and making search work?
|
| Will you offer retention policies on data?
|
| Any plans to include direct messaging platforms (if they offer
| api's)?
| [deleted]
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Understand where you're coming from a privacy perspective. Our
| encryption operates at the file system/storage device layer
| level so it doesn't affect our index at all other than a small
| I/O performance hit when storing and accessing data.
|
| W.r.t. retention policies, information is immediately deleted
| upon account deletion. We also delete all data after account
| inactivity for 2 months.
|
| Definitely exploring messaging platforms, interestingly enough
| iMessage (despite not being available via API) can be indexed
| locally on Macs. Just not something that's on the top of our
| backlog. Thanks for your thoughts!
| e12e wrote:
| > Our encryption operates at the file system/storage device
| layer level so it doesn't affect our index at all
|
| This means you store most data in plaintext in the index?
| Enough to reconstruct most of the content?
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Yes. We are SOC II certified and have strict limitations on
| who can access that data and under what circumstances (only
| if given explicit permission by the user). Definitely
| understand that could be a deal breaker for some, but with
| current methods, we believe that this approach will allow
| us to deliver more powerful search and greater value in the
| long run.
| rsstack wrote:
| Love the concept. I wish there were a way to add custom
| integrations for in-house software we use or uncommon systems we
| use. It would work better if these things were configured at the
| organization-level and not user-level (i.e. IT connecting
| Confluence to Needl instead of individual users requesting access
| one-by-one).
|
| Typo on the pricing page: "and soon to be may others", I assume
| meant "many".
|
| Would love to try but my daily driver is a Linux machine. I just
| don't spend enough hours a week on my Macbook for it to be
| relevant right now. Edit: I'll try the Chrome extension.
|
| Edit: The hover for "Free for 14 days" in the pricing page is
| black-on-black unless you hover exactly on the text. Webflow
| hover styling is awful, happens to me often too :)
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Understand where you're coming from on the org-level auth vs
| individual. Part of the goal with Needl is to be entirely self-
| serve, where one member of a team can use it without needing
| company wide approval.
|
| Thanks for calling out the site issues -- will get those fixed
| asap!
| rsstack wrote:
| I just emailed you for help. When trying to self-serve, I
| immediately got blocked by automated corporate policies :)
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Yup! Hopefully the workaround I sent was easy enough --
| please let me know if there's anything else I can help
| with!
| xp84 wrote:
| If one member of a team is meant to be able to just use it
| without IT being involved, don't you foresee companies
| getting very cranky about an employee uploading all their
| work documents, emails, etc. to an external cloud they don't
| control?
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Certainly happens - in this case IT usually contacts the
| employee, who connects us with IT and then we share our SOC
| II / describe our security processes and they grant us
| company wide access. Ends up not being a massive problem,
| but the added benefit on an employee / individual being
| able to self-serve offsets it, in our mind at least.
|
| At some point, we'll likely kick off an enterprise-focused
| initiative. Thanks for bringing this up, very good points.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Looks good, will definitely give it a try. I'm starting to have
| so many apps that I trigger with keyboard shortcuts (Raycast,
| etc)...getting more difficult to choose shortcuts that don't
| conflict and remember all of them.
| MaxKeenan wrote:
| Fair point. Some users set Needl as their default tab via our
| chrome extension -- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/n
| eedl/hepjidniooep.... Can even open quick search via the chrome
| extension in the browser too.
|
| Others just use the web app -- https://app.needl.tech/
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Yeah, actually I was surprised that ctrl + space didn't
| conflict with anything I already have, unless I'm in Firefox,
| in which case it conflicts with the "List all tabs" search
| thing.
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