[HN Gopher] Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
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Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
Author : bratao
Score : 166 points
Date : 2023-10-04 19:00 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.vespa.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.vespa.ai)
| neilk wrote:
| Vespa was actually very cool at the time as a document-oriented
| search engine, occupying the same niche as Solr and elaborations
| of that like ElasticSearch. But I don't know if it's competitive
| today.
|
| This blog post says it's "developed by Yahoo" which is I guess
| true. But it was originally an acquisition, largely developed by
| a team in Norway, and apparently most Vespa development still
| happens there.
| dathinab wrote:
| > don't know if it's competitive today
|
| very, it's outcompeting most vector databases on features and
| maturity when it comes to vector search while having very
| powerful and flexible and proven text search too
|
| The tricky part is, it's more a platform to build complex
| search systems with then "just" a vector database. So if a
| found a company today which focus is to create clever multi
| phase search pipelines and train (e.g. domain adopt) LLMs for
| calculating embeddings etc. then it's probably _the_ best
| solution by far, you probably can get away with having only AI
| engines devops and a single programmer (who might also most
| times just do devops). But if you need to deeply integrate it
| into a different existing search system things are less grate.
|
| And I would love to see some modernization, like having a
| format for structured queries which is more widely supported
| then YQL... (eying graphql here)
| bratao wrote:
| Yeah +1 for VERY competitive. The vector capabilities of
| Vespa are incredible and the Text/ranking features are
| amazing. I don't think any other product have those two sides
| so developed as them.
| [deleted]
| matsemann wrote:
| Norway also had the FAST search company acquired by Microsoft.
| Is Norway particularly good at making search stuff?
| jkb79 wrote:
| Actually, Vespa comes out of the same FAST company. Yahoo
| bought Overture/Altavista and a lot of other web search
| companies in 2003, including the web search division of FAST.
| The Enterprise search division of FAST was later acquired by
| Microsoft.
| daveevad wrote:
| Anyone able to share the definitive history of the polar bears
| that visited the office?
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Polar_Be...
| eirikref wrote:
| It had all started a bit earlier with a colleague (I assume
| that's you up there, jkb79 :) pulling the leg of a guy visiting
| us from the Bangalore office, about the polar bears roaming the
| streets of Trondheim. We just thought we'd prank him a bit
| about having more dangerous animals than they did in India.
| Nothing too serious.
|
| So a few months later I woke up early one morning and saw it
| had been snowing all night. I made sure to get over to the
| office before the traffic started ruining the image of barren,
| desolate place where you could entertain the idea of polar
| bears roaming the streets, looking for young, fresh engineering
| meat.
|
| I took a few photos, walked inside, and got busy looking for
| photos of polar bears that could fit into this idea of upping
| the Dangerous Wildlife War between India and the home of the
| proper vikings.
|
| So I did a little bit of photoshopping, uploaded it to my
| Flickr account, and sent the link to a few other yahoos around
| the world. We had a bit of fun with it, but I don't think
| anyone with access to this worldwide web of information will be
| too fooled. (It's quite easy to figure out that there are no
| polar bears on the Norwegian mainland, so I've never been too
| bothered about leaving it up there.)
|
| You can see the ehm... original at
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/eirikref/3262204184 for a few of
| the comments and fun from back then.
|
| Edit: So that's about as definite as you'll ever get it. And
| I'll never again admit to it being photoshopped in any shape or
| form ;)
| [deleted]
| jkb79 wrote:
| Hehe, it was a joke, we don't have polar bears on the mainland
| of Norway. But, it was fun to show the photo to visitors from
| different countries. "Be careful when you walk back to the
| hotel".
| sph wrote:
| Piaggio is not gonna be happy that someone has called their
| company Vespa.
| rmccue wrote:
| "vespa" means wasp in Italian, and it seems unlikely that
| they're in the same trademark categories.
| sph wrote:
| I'll go create my line of scooters and call it Google, see if
| their lawyers care about not being in the same trademark
| category.
|
| The Vespa is an iconic and well known brand in Italy and
| worldwide. If Piaggio isn't litigating it, I wonder what
| their lawyers are even doing.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Try telling that to Apple.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| Little known fact...
|
| It is believed that Apple paid the Beatles a little over
| $500 million for Apple Corp trademark rights so they could
| market "Apple Music"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Compute
| r
| autoexec wrote:
| Wasps are a nuisance known for causing pain and property
| destruction. "vespa" as a name for a product always seemed
| strange to me. At least the scooters were vaguely waspish
| looking and buzzed around town. What's yahoo's excuse?
| jkb79 wrote:
| Vespa was the internal code name for the project going back
| to 2005ish, vertical search platform.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| Probably should've been Vespla by that logic
| autoexec wrote:
| V-SPlat has a nice ring to it.
| fzliu wrote:
| I was at Yahoo almost a decade ago, when vector search within
| Vespa was first being rolled out in production use cases. It was
| already serving similarity search requests for Flickr back then.
|
| Even though I'm with Zilliz/Milvus now, I wholeheartedly support
| and recommend folks check out and try Vespa. Congrats to the
| Vespa team!
|
| EDIT: For folks on Twitter, you should follow Jo
| (https://twitter.com/jobergum) from Vespa if you aren't already.
| Great combo of technical content, hot takes, and vector database
| memes!
| manp2 wrote:
| any resource for one to learn on vector search? any textbook or
| whitepaper recommendations?
|
| I am learning lsh right now and find it fascinating
| jkb79 wrote:
| Thank you for the shout-out Frank!
| 90-00-09 wrote:
| Off topic... looking forward to more engineers moving to
| Mastodon. I have Twitter/X blocked at DNS level and still
| fairly frequently encounter interesting accounts that I can't
| check out.
| srameshc wrote:
| Every time I see Twitter/X here, I want to say this.
| spullara wrote:
| They have absolutely the best take on embedding search + normal
| faceted search. Here is a blog post about how it works:
|
| https://blog.vespa.ai/vespa-hybrid-billion-scale-vector-sear...
| cfors wrote:
| Can anybody speak to how Vespa compares to some other Vector
| Database solutions? Seems like there's so many options today
| jkb79 wrote:
| Disclaimer, I work on Vespa.
|
| If you look for just pure vector similarity search, there are
| many alternatives. But Vespa's tensor support, multi-vector
| indexing and the ability to express models like colBERT ( _1)
| or cross-encoders makes it stand out if you need to move beyond
| pure vector search support.
|
| Plus, for RAG use cases, it's a full blown text search engine
| as well, allowing hybrid ranking combinations. Also with many
| pure vector databases like Pinecone, you cannot describe an
| object with more than one vector, if you have different vector
| models for the object, you need different indexes, and then
| duplicate metadata across those indexes (if you need filtering
| + vector search).
|
| _1 https://blog.vespa.ai/pretrained-transformer-language-
| models...
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| So what exactly does Yahoo do these days?
| throwaway280383 wrote:
| Ex-yahoo here (Quit in 2022, at the height of salary boom :)
|
| Yahoo is a profitable company with atleast 5B $ in revenue.
| Search and Mail are extremely profitable businesses. When was
| the last time you changed your mail id? Search is atleast 2B $
| plus in revenue. Mail is 1B $ plus in revenue. Yahoo Finance,
| Yahoo sports, yahoo news are all highly trafficked websites
| although I dont know the revenue numbers. I do wager that if
| yahoo is put on stock market, its valuation will be around $10B
| although private equity has spent only 4B$ on acquiring them.
| Who knows what went into the discussions.
|
| Why did I leave? Because I figured my career growth is
| elsewhere.
|
| One thing I learnt at yahoo is that large companies take a very
| long time to die . You can have a profitable career in them,
| even if YoY growth is slowing.
| Irishsteve wrote:
| for comparative purposes snap do 4b a year and are a bit
| flat, same as Pinterest. Last 10k I saw from yahoo is 2016
| where they also did 5b top line.
| parthdesai wrote:
| >When was the last time you changed your mail id?
|
| I get this sentiment, but I don't know anyone in my age group
| (late 20s/early 30s) that use yahoo mail either. My dad did
| use yahoo mail, but i'm guessing it has about 20 years left.
| throwaway280383 wrote:
| Most growth currently is international. Remember, gmail
| doesn't work in China :)
| simfree wrote:
| Which Yahoo services work in China?
| 90-00-09 wrote:
| Interesting point but makes me wonder whether it's
| meaningful. There are plenty of local Chinese email
| providers, why would anyone choose Yahoo specifically?
| [deleted]
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| Yahoo Finance is still the best
| Tommah wrote:
| > When was the last time you changed your mail id?
|
| In 2006, when I moved from Yahoo Mail to Gmail.
| slimsag wrote:
| Wow, search.yahoo.com actually looks kind of nice/snappy
| rgrove wrote:
| It always has! This is one of Yahoo's best-kept secrets,
| sadly.
|
| (I worked on Yahoo Search -- and search.yahoo.com -- from
| 2007 to 2010)
| febeling wrote:
| indeed. Shows again the milliseconds really count
| dathinab wrote:
| and in difference to google you don't get swamped by ads
| that much, I mean the search results seem seriously better
| then 2023 google...
| gardenhedge wrote:
| search results page isn't even responsive. Because I am
| using vertical tabs I need to scroll sideways..
| nashashmi wrote:
| It works without JS!
| vinhboy wrote:
| Yahoo home page is actually very engaging (in a car wreck
| kind of way), and they haven't updated it much in years. I
| definitely believe they are doing well.
| fermentation wrote:
| Seems really popular in Japan for some reason.
| toddmorey wrote:
| NTT investment/ partnership
| ilickpoolalgae wrote:
| I don't think the Japanese entity and US entity have any
| relation to each other anymore. I think US entity divested
| itself of Yahoo Japan completely in 2018 or so. Yahoo Japan
| is now collectively owned by Softbank and Naver under some
| holding company (it was big news in Japan when the merger
| happened).
| mathrawka wrote:
| They actually rebranded from "Yahoo! Japan" to "Line Yahoo"
| https://www.lycorp.co.jp/ja/
| lmm wrote:
| It's not just a rebranding, they've merged with Line.
| jfax wrote:
| No relation to Yahoo in the US. Spun off from a previous
| incarnation of Yahoo in that doesn't exist anymore. In
| practice, they're two companies that confusingly share the
| same name.
| owlninja wrote:
| It feels like their fantasy sports platforms are pretty
| popular.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Mail and Finance
| [deleted]
| ram_rar wrote:
| Wow, this brings back soo many old memories of mine @ Yahoo! .
| Almost a decade ago, vespa inside Yahoo was way ahead of its
| time. Glad, it finally spun out. I wonder how does this compare
| with other vector Dbs like pinecone, chroma...
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| What a weird name for a product. Even they need to tell you which
| Vespa they are.
|
| Like, when naming things...maybe not use a name that people use
| to define a category. (AKA: A Vespa is to Scooters as a PostIt is
| to sticky notes)
| ginko wrote:
| I'm surprized they haven't gotten a nasty letter from Piaggio
| yet.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Vespa is the Italian (and Latin) word for wasp, not sure
| Piaggio can claim ownership outside of the domain of
| commercial vehicles under idk EU or WTO rules.
| bartread wrote:
| And also pick something that's distinctive and easily
| Googleable. I'm tired of companies and products picking super
| generic names that mean I get swamped with spammy SEOd results
| every time I search for information/help/reviews/etc on them.
| [deleted]
| peterstjohn wrote:
| +1 to everybody that mentioned that Vespa has great vector
| support _and_ lexical filtering. And you likely will end up
| needing both.
|
| Don't sleep on some of its newer features like multi-vector
| document fields, either...
| boredumb wrote:
| I've always wanted a self driving scooter.
| happytiger wrote:
| This is fabulous and I'm very excited to see where this project
| goes.
|
| It definitely has legs and if the team understands just how
| enormous the potential could be, annd especially why they _could_
| disrupt, I'm even more eager to see what they do.
| simonw wrote:
| Vespa has been around for a LONG time. When I worked at Yahoo
| back in 2005-2007 the Flickr team were using it to scale Flickr -
| they were integrating it in order to serve things like public tag
| pages, to take the load off their MySQL cluster.
|
| I remember understanding it as the internal equivalent to
| something like Solr, although actually it predated it - looks
| like the first public Solr open source release (coming out of
| CNET) was January 2006.
| jkb79 wrote:
| Yeah, I worked with the Flickr team on that project. Scaling to
| billions of photos, with partial update support of popularity
| for ranking.
|
| Back then, the properties had to stand up their own Vespa
| cluster(s), later on we created a managed service out of it.
| And, yes, the original plan for Vespa was to be a Vertical
| Search Platform, that is where the name Vespa comes from. More
| on the history in this blog post https://blog.vespa.ai/vespa-
| is-becoming-its-own-company/
| vinaypai wrote:
| TIL: Yahoo still exists in 2023
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Still one of the top website
| orangepurple wrote:
| Yahoo search delivers superior search results for tech related
| queries despite supposedly using Bing
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Plus the best finance page.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| What hasn't spun out of Yahoo?
| weare138 wrote:
| Yahoo could have been the next AWS if it hadn't been horribly
| mismanaged.
| ramses0 wrote:
| Maps. Groups. Upcoming/Local. Flickr. Tech was great,
| groundbreaking at the time (however, that had its own drag on
| velocity). Product "management" of anything post-acquisition
| was demonstrably atrocious.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| And tens of others: Sun Microsystems, even Google, etc.
| rrdharan wrote:
| Could have been Google, Could have owned Google..
|
| https://yourstory.com/2023/05/yahoos-billion-dollar-
| blunders....
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