vivekraghunatha

This is ultimately the bet we are making. We only make money if the product's good enough that you will pay for it. The result IMO is our incentives are perfectly aligned with end users and that's the way it should be. 80% of employees at Neeva are working purely on product & tech to make the end user experience better, and the other 20% are interacting with Neeva members to make sure we are listening to their feedback and using it to shape the product experience

VC funded -- Sequoia, Greylock and Inovia. There's a bit of Cambrian explosion recently in search engines, which is promising as well.

As for the costs of running crawlers, indexers and search serving systems, yes, it's not for the faint of heart, but it's less than you think it is thanks to the wonders of AWS and Spark. It's basically S3 costs, compute on Spark and Databricks, and serving off SSDs.

LOL

My personal opinion is that Duck tried to have its cake and eat it too. Their positioning is "we just serve up results, no editorial" and then when the shit hits the fan, they end up disappointing all their users.

The reality with all search engines is the following:
1. Search ranking is editorial. There's no getting around it. You write down human eval relevance judgement guidelines; you train your systems to it. That's an independent search engine that is implicitly editorializing. You reskin a 3rd party; that is you depending on the 3rd party's implicit editorial judgments.
2. So what should we do? Part 1 -- be transparent about how we rank. We have inhouse raters labeling domains as ads-supported, trusted, forums, blogs that we surface in our UX so you can filter down to the kinds of sites you like. We also integrate with 3rd parties like Newsguard to give you reputational signals. (And for those of you who want alternatives to Newsguard, please send them our way -- we will consider for integration)
3. So what should we do? Part 2 -- control. At the end of the day, we need to give users agency over their own ranking. if you want to upvote or downvote sites, that's what Neeva's preferred providers does.

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To sum up, ranking is editorializing. With that reality in mind, we give you transparency. We give you control.

For me, it was the realization that incredibly smart, well meaning engineers who are looking to optimize for a metric can do hundreds of well meaning launches every year, and if the metric is incorrectly set (by execs like me) and incentives between users and customers are not perfectly aligned, you can end up with pretty bad long term outcomes.

At the same time, I get where you're coming from, and it's totally okay to be skeptical. To you, I'd say -- give us a shot and judge us by what we do.