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Neeva Announces Public Availability of Its Ads Free, Private Search Engine
- Animats 5y ago"Sign up and get three months free, then only $4.95 per month."
- Y_Y 5y agoI can't believe this, but I may have reached the point where I'd be willing to pay for search that isn't shit.
- donmcronald 5y agoOddly 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.
- analognoise 5y agoI'd pay just to get the old Google Books search back the way it used to be. I'd pay just for that.
- Animats 5y agoI 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?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wayneftw 5y agoThere'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?
- _benj 5y agoI 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...
- bkallus 5y agoFirefox for iOS lets you set any search engine you want.
- jacobmarble 5y agoI use Neeva with Firefox on iOS.
- proxyforce 5y agoSome 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/id1543288638 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/neeva-browser-search-engine/id.... Disclaimer: I'm an engineer working on Neeva.
- twodayslate 5y agoIt 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.
- OrvalWintermute 5y agoIf 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 5y agoI gave it a try a while ago and it looked like their search results come from bing like duckduckgo.
- chewmieser 5y agoI'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 https://neeva.com/neevabot
- sct202 5y agoLast year when they announced they said they were using Bing: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/technology/google-neeva-executive.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/technology/google-neeva-e...
- kyawzazaw 5y agothey have their own cralwers too
- m-i-l 5y agoAlso 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 https://www.protocol.com/neeva-search [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/neeva https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/neeva
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- smoldesu 5y agoPlease update this title to reflect that "public availability" actually means a "3 month free trial".
- nickreese 5y agoThe 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 5y agoThat’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?
- gentleman11 5y agoCan you test the search results without signing up?
- peauts 5y agono but it just needs an email to try it
- gentleman11 5y ago> Created by ex-Google execs Do you worry about any non compete or nondisclosure risks?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yumraj 5y agoCalifornia has no non-compete.
- gentleman11 5y agoSeriously? Even fast food workers have to sign here
- detaro 5y agofor after their employment? (which I guess is the unspoken assumption in this context)
- dekhn 5y agoThe 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.
- jacobmarble 5y agoI 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.
- kesslern 5y agoI'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.
- mdaniel 5y ago> 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. That's why I stopped using them (I was in some kind of preview cohort before this announcement); I just want to point out that can't isn't the right word -- it is for sure possible to authorize your use of their search engine without relying on cookies or localStorage or whatever, but they just have chosen not to It turned me off when I was an alpha user, but it would make me tableflip if I was paying real money and they still didn't make any efforts toward solving that use case
- ElijahLynn 5y ago
- yumraj 5y agoGenuine 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?
- s3r3nity 5y agoI 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 5y agoYes, 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 5y agoNeeva is trying to do better than Bing. Also, Neeva does not do ads.
- proxyforce 5y agoAnother 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
- dekhn 5y agoReminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop
- osipovas 5y agoLooks like they're doing some sort of geo-filtering. I wasn't able to sign up from Canada.
- donmcronald 5y agoSame. 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 5y agoSame 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.
- azinman2 5y agoWhat’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 5y agoTo 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?
- dzonga 5y agosearch 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.
- nickserv 5y agoIs 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 https://neeva.com/about
- mottosso 5y agoCan you expand on this?
- diggernet 5y agoI 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 5y ago"Neeva was founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at YouTube)"
- MiddleEndian 5y agoFor 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 https://www.middleendian.com/limbogoogle.png 1. https://www.middleendian.com/limbobing.png https://www.middleendian.com/limbobing.png
- dekhn 5y agoWhat 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 5y agoYeah 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.
- therealdrag0 5y agoWith DDG on my phone in incognito mode (my normal usage) I get nothing at all related to bending over backwards.
- ElijahLynn 5y agotldr; This appears to be run by 4 ex-googlers, see bottom of > https://neeva.com/ https://neeva.com/
- rank0 5y agoI 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!
- dannywarner 5y agoI 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-ramaswamy-controls-a-60-billion-business-2015-4/ https://www.businessinsider.com.au/google-exec-sridhar-ramas... https://camilancumicumi.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-former-google-executive-takes-aim-at.html https://camilancumicumi.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-former-google...
- judge2020 5y ago> 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/ https://blog.youtube/press/
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoI don't value YT for how much it costs to run I value it for the videos that people choose to upload for free. I am not sure that it matters much to me that I am downloading videos from an enormous site with massive traffic. Some of the best videos I get from YT have very few views and the uploaders are not looking to financially profit from sharing them. These videos could easily be served from smaller sites with less traffic that do not cost much to run. I get reliable downloads from all over the internet, not just Google servers. I would not complain about YT because I never see any ads, and downloads are relatively easy, but I do think it's a bit myopic to imagine that YT is the only way we could ever have accesss to so much video. I think that was/is inevitable. The internet allows people to share stuff.
- zorrolovsky 5y agoI 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://neeva.com/privacy https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy/#numbered https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy/#numbered https://mullvad.net/en/help/privacy-policy/ 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.
- killingtime74 5y agoWe live in a post evidence world
- zorrolovsky 5y agoVery interesting comment! Any ideas on what are we supposed to do in this world? I keep on thinking we need to take a step back, come back to evidence and logic and make things right. But deep inside I know that's not going to happen. In the post-evidence world, it's too easy for people without moral to grab power and benefit. That is, it makes it easier for those in power to grab more power. That's why things will remain the same for a while. Is the solution to simply smile and carry on? Is it time for a (non-violent) revolution?
- chx 5y agoThis 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? It would be an absolute kicker -- people paying for search probably are extremely high value targets.
- 1024core 5y agoTheir "privacy promise" page https://neeva.com/digital-bill-of-rights https://neeva.com/digital-bill-of-rights talks a lot, but doesn't say much about what they do.
- encryptluks2 5y agoBecause 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.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoSuggested reading: https://web.archive.org/web/20210625205312/https://neeva.com/privacy https://web.archive.org/web/20210625205312/https://neeva.com... [x] Collects data [x] Collects name, address and phone number [x] Collects contacts from other accounts [x] Collects usage data [x] Solicits personal data through "surveys" [x] Uses cookies, local storage and "other technologies" to collect any information (e.g., personal information) [x] Claims purpose of collection is to "improve product/service" but are not limited by any enforceable user agreement regarding such purpose [x] May collect data about its users from other other companies [x] May "have a presence" (e.g., tracking pixel) on other sites/services [x] May transfer personal data to subsidiaries, with no control over what those companies may do with the data [x] May transfer personal data to third party companies, with no control over what those companies may do with the data [x] May use aggregated data for any (commercial) purpose, not subject to privacy policy [x] May use "de-identified" data for any (commercial) purpose, not subject to privacy policy [x] May move data anywhere in the world at any time, for any reason If the user is paying, why is there no "contract" governing the "service". It might define the rights and obligations of Neeva and the user. If Neeva violates their privacy policy (how would we know), then what happens. Users are paying Neeva, so potentially they could could claim financial losses, but what exactly is Neeva promising to do. There is no document that details what exactly users are paying for. Even practical terms such as how many results can a user retreive per hour. A look at the "bill of rights" (doubtful this could be considered a contract for service) reveals there are few restrictions on Neeva, other than Neeva will not retain data for longer than 90 days unless asked to do so by the user or required by law. (However they are explcitly allowed in the privacy policy to transfer the data to a third partes who may be under no such restrictions.) While the plan may not be to sell ads, this project could be aimed at (user-financed) aggregated data collection. There is zero information on how they will use aggregated data and any such use is not subject the privacy policy, it's free from any restrictions. There is not even any statement that aggregated data would be anonymised or, if so, how.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- oliv__ 5y agoThis looks awesome and I hope it succeeds, but I have a tiny nitpick: it's too bad that when they came up with the name they didn't think of a name that sounded good when you say "Just X it": "google it" is basically second nature now, "neeva it" is hard to say/sounds weird
- donkarma 5y agoNeev it?
- subsubzero 5y agoI am 100% in favor of any product that features no ads and centers its experience on the user. I have high hopes for this site, I feel like the cost may dissuade some, but a small fee is a small price to pay for privacy.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Animats 5y agoAccording to the Forbes article, this isn't a real search engine. It's just a reseller wrapper around Bing, like Yahoo Search. I thought they were really doing a search engine of their own, but no.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y agoA real search engine costs billions in hardware costs alone.
- Animats 5y agoActually, no. Cuil did it for about $50 million. They failed due to lack of a revenue model, but they did get search working, sort of.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y agoThere are only 2 real search engines capable of indexing the entire Web: google and bing. Google search employs about 1 million servers.
- londons_explore 5y agoNeevabot seems to deliberately 'misunderstand' robots txt files excluding it: https://neeva.com/neevabot https://neeva.com/neevabot They go crawling anywhere googlebot is allowed... As a webmaster who explicitly allowed only Googlebot, I'm pretty annoyed to find another companies bot crawling my site too, doubling the server load (crawling consists of about 30% of my compute budget for Googlebot alone - it turns out bots have far worse cache hit rates than real users). This 'dishonest' behaviour of Neeva has cost me ~$2000 so far... Will they be refunding me that from all their subscriptions?
- stephanreynolds 5y agoDoes not allow registration from Estonia :(