Their privacy policy:<p><a href="https://neeva.co/privacy" rel="nofollow">https://neeva.co/privacy</a><p>They still plan to collect a lot of data, and share it with:<p><pre><code> IT and related services
Payment processors
Analytics providers
Customer service providers
Vendors to support the provision of the Services
</code></pre>
<i>Microsoft is one such provider where we may share limited personal information in order to make the Services available. You can read about their use of data in Microsoft's privacy policy.</i><p>So, Microsoft's frequently-changing (last updated: January 2021) privacy policy effectively applies:<p><a href="https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement" rel="nofollow">https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement</a><p>While more competition is always good news, I can't see this as a privacy-conscious choice.<p>Edit: You can even connect your Google account, and they will collect the data about you and your contacts from it. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting blocked for this by Google on, ironically, privacy grounds (Google has no interest in assisting an emerging competitor like this if they can get away with it, and they probably can).<p>Then, there's this gem:<p><i>We may aggregate or de-identify the information we collect. Aggregated or de-identified data is not subject to this Privacy Policy.</i><p>It's been demonstrated before that this is also a privacy risk. AOL's "de-identified" release of search-engine data turned out to be a privacy disaster:<p><a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/aols-disturbing-glimpse-into-users-lives/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnet.com/news/aols-disturbing-glimpse-into-users...</a><p><a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/aol-apologizes-for-release-of-user-search-data/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnet.com/news/aol-apologizes-for-release-of-user...</a><p>A privacy-respecting search engine should just not collect all this data in the first place.
Although I've asked before, a great many times, can anyone explain to me why, if I search for "Carburetor for Ford Fiesta", just showing me ads for carburetors with no intrusive data mining isn't enough for companies these days?<p>I would, in all likelihood, click on something like that.<p>It's easy to infer "oh, this guy needs a new carburetor for his Ford Fiesta" from my search. What possible additional benefit is there to mining the ever-living hell out of me further?<p>Who is paying for this shit?<p>Is advertising and tracking a massive ponzi scheme?<p>Edit: I should point out that although the content piece doesn't explicitly mention ads, the creator is an ad-man from Google and I'd put money on it having ads anyway... hence my comment.
I wish them success, but honestly I'm just curious around how a search startup (and I mean a true search startup, one that does its own indexing) can even hope to compete against the giants these days (and let's face it, in the English language it's pretty much all Google with Bing a distant second).<p>I mean, when Google started the internet was actually small enough that it could be indexed relatively cheaply. These days, the internet is so enormous, and user expectations around hyper local content and being constantly up to date are so high, I don't see how one could begin to compete without billions.
It's the 1% fallacy. "Surely we can steal 1% of the search market, Google will never have 100%. Just one percent of Google's profits is seventeen hojillibillion dollars per quarter. Makes perfect sense to put in $40 million to grab that market share"<p>See also everyone starting their own Facebook competitor back in the day.
<i>Google itself only raised $35 million in total VC funding before going public in 2004</i><p>For this comparison to be useful, Neeva would have to be paying its devs 2004 salaries.
How does a search engine, that talks about privacy, have a waitlist?<p>Does it mean that it does not support anonymous search and you need to login, or somehow identify yourself, in order to use it to search.<p>Does not sound very privacy oriented - am I missing something? Perhaps someone who has access can chime in.
I do not mind paying, but not sure how it helps tracking: if you pay, they even know more about you than if you used google. So you have to believe them for not using the payment records for tracking you. They have valuable information about you; you are probably rich (who pays for search?!), you have a card so you are probably autonomous etc.<p>That said, more competition is good anyway in this space.
Note that, based on progress so far, they're not actually building a new search engine as such - they're spending the money on buying the results in from Bing and on marketing[0].<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23960741" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23960741</a>
Regardless of the validity of the business case Sridhar is a really really smart guy who has seen how the sausage is made inside Google. If you think like a Google engineering VP you can understand why this isn't such a crazy bet after all. He knows how to rebuild the Google stack fresh.
I have an easier time understanding a subscription-model social network to help weed out trolls and bots, but subscribe just to search to get rid of the ads...? I mean, even if DuckDuckGo didn't exist, this would strike me as a funny concept. Also, I see they want to "personalize" my experience. So they want to harvest search patterns and figure out my personal life as usual? Besides the questionable ethics here, I'm not even convinced filter bubbles are a good way to reach objective information, and you'd think this would be sort of a technological goal for year 2021 onwards, given what took place in 2020.
Too bad they raised money from VCs, giving them control over the direction of this search engine, now they're on a treadmill.<p>Going to be acquired by Apple sooner or later for their search engine or (most likely) will shut down in less than 2 years due to pressure by VCs.<p>Any business that raises money from VCs and touts claims of privacy being a differentiator is almost always suspect.
Tried to use DDG for about 3-4 months on all browsers, desktop and mobile. Didn't work out. IDK why bc everything was good enough but there're small subtilties which felt better with Google, one thing I remember was Google's ability to understand that I just did a local search and showed me maps, Google Reviews and so on. I can't remember all issues buy I often appended the site to get the right results or those results I was expecting. Maybe I am just used to Google or Google is really somehow better (except with one thing, Pinterest). Just want to say that it's going to be hard to get people to move away from Google. Compared, leaving FB was a piece of cake.
> plans to unveil an ad-free, personalized search experience. Expect it to be on a paid subscription basis, likely with a free trial period.<p>Oh please gimme paid everything! But 100% ad-free, tracking-free, DRM-free, programmable and configurable!<p>I wish my ISP could just charge 3 times as much as it does for the broadband, distribute 2/3 (or a half - perhaps that would mean extra overhead so they should be given extra rewarded too) to the websites I visit and we could have no-bullshit web again...
I hope they’re successful. Competition in this space is good for everyone. And I wouldn’t mind paying a subscription to search without my every search being tracked.
I'd love to be wrong, but I have a hard time seeing this succeed. However I feel somebody can/should disrupt Google by obsoleting search.<p><i>Search:Information retrieval</i> as <i>steering wheel: automobiles</i><p>With autonomy the steering wheel can be dispensed with. Hopefully someone invents something that can do the same with search, as we know it.
That always boggles my mind. There are a ton of startups out there which tackle serious environmental/sustainable problems struggling to get minimal funding and "another" search engine gets $40m? What good will that do? Oh, BTW, feel free to vote me down as usual.
A few years ago this was attempted but as a paid Twitter. I dont think its around anymore.<p>As far as ads go I personally like the search ones. If I'm searching for BMW car service I want the local shop targeting me not 10 pages of dealers. With that said I wouldn't mind seeing search competition.
There is absolutely no competition in search engine market. Google almost host for 90% searches (approx) how do they even plan to compete with google. When big companies like bing is struggling even after a decade to even compete , i am surprised at this.
First thing I saw on their webpage, a box saying "Enter an email". Yeah, it's just a pre-launch thing, but not a good look from a privacy point of view.