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A comment on Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shutting down. Parent comment

Re:Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shut... by nugget on Saturday May 20, 2023 @02:06PM (#36014166)
Neeva failed because they didn’t understand distribution. Sundar became a rising star and ultimately CEO of Google because he directly managed more paid distribution and user acquisition for Google search than anyone else. Not a coincidence. Google promotes the narrative that they organically grew to dominate the search market when in fact they spent many billions of dollars on user acquisition (while also, for most of that time, having the best product).
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Re:Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shut... by dehrmann on Saturday May 20, 2023 @04:06PM (#36015086)
You're talking about being the default search engine in Firefox and Safari, right?
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Re:Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shut... by EscapeFromNY on Saturday May 20, 2023 @04:18PM (#36015183)
That, and also bundling their browser (and hence their search engine) inside lots of popular apps during the late '00s and early '10s.

Remember these prompts? https://www.thewindowsclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ch...

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Re:Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shut... by kyrra on Saturday May 20, 2023 @04:15PM (#36015160)
Sundar was the lead PM on Chrome (before it even released).
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Re:Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shut... by nugget on Saturday May 20, 2023 @07:34PM (#36016590)
Toolbar, Chrome, other software partnerships and many enterprise search deals besides Firefox and Safari.
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Re:Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shut... by quickthrower2 on Saturday May 20, 2023 @05:29PM (#36015794)
Not best product. The only product. IMO altavista and yahoo were so far behind they were hopeless, relying on unchanged habits and noisy news.
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Re:Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shut... by 8n4vidtmkvmk on Sunday May 21, 2023 @02:14AM (#36018457)
Alltheweb was good
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Re:Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shut... by Cockbrand on Sunday May 21, 2023 @04:07AM (#36018869)
Indeed, they had an excellent search back then. But in a world before auto-complete in the URL bar, I wondered why they hadn't come up with a shorter and more catchy name. I usually was just too lazy to type "alltheweb.com", and I always had to think for a second to remember the URL in the first place.
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Re:Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shut... by giantrobot on Sunday May 21, 2023 @02:44AM (#36018568)
Yahoo never had great search, they started life as a directory rather than a full search engine. Their first search functionality only searched their directory. Later they used Inktomi's crawler based search.
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Re:Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shut... by usaar333 on Sunday May 21, 2023 @12:10AM (#36017957)
> Neeva failed because they didn’t understand distribution

No, the team and its VCs fully understood distribution.

Neeva never got to the point of having a compelling enough product where cost of user aq was below LTV for a large enough market.

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Re:Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shut... by mi_lk on Sunday May 21, 2023 @02:25AM (#36018498)
Yea, distribution > product (most of the time) is almost startup 101 these days. It's dismissive to think the team and its big-name VCs behind it don't know the importance of distribution
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Re:Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shut... by MichaelZuo on Sunday May 21, 2023 @06:00PM (#36025053)
Wasn't Stripe mostly word-of-mouth, with quite little money spent, until recently?
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