rahilbathwal

Great point. We’re integrating content from a number of community forums, starting with Reddit and Hacker News (with more to come!). We believe that there is a lot of value in content from real people, especially on queries that are typically heavily SEO optimized. There is an increasing trend of users explicitly searching for more Reddit content (eg. adding “reddit” to your searches) which makes Reddit a good place to start exploring how we can improve search results.

In user surveys, we found that over half of users felt the best Reddit result was better than the result at rank 3 (and almost a third felt that it was as good as or better than the result at rank 1), which was not true for any other site.

As for trying us out, we are available to anyone in the US. And expanding to other markets early Q4. Feel free to drop us a line at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) and we can hopefully get you access soon!

In the same vein as Alan Kay's famous quote "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware", we strongly believe that building our own index is important if we want to compete in the search space.

For one, having our own crawl and index allows us to build features like quicklinks (https://neeva.com/blog/quicklinks-adding-community-forums) by inverting links from the webpages we have crawled or building a discussion forum specific experience by restricting search to specific websites such as Reddit.

To add, search in general is a challenging problem and takes a lot of careful selection and tuning of various signals. This makes it very difficult for non-search engines to just add search as a feature.

This is also where we think Neeva can provide value with our focus on improving search. A lot of the work we have done in creating core ranking signals such as topicality and textual relevance, query centrality to the document, query independent document popularity, etc. apply directly to ranking Reddit posts as well. Additional Reddit-specific signals such as upvotes, comments, etc. also help with ranking but are not enough on their own.

That is a great question and point. We typically do some form of beta in the lead up to our next market, but you raise an interesting point. Happy to share your feedback with the team.

+1 to getting started with projects. It’s a great way to get practical experience with any programming language and generally helps build skills that transfer to other projects/languages as well. If you’re just starting out, I’d also recommend codecademy.com.