I tried signing up a few weeks ago and they are not allowing international or Australian access.<p>I'm surprised the comments here are missing the elephant in the room.<p>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.<p>Vivek Raghunathan put all the ads on YouTube. Those ads are so bad Google makes money from people paying to remove them.<p>They left Google after a scandal with YouTube showing ads on videos that exploited young children and appealed to pedophiles.<p>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.<p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com.au/google-exec-sridhar-ramaswamy-controls-a-60-billion-business-2015-4/" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com.au/google-exec-sridhar-ramas...</a><p><a href="https://camilancumicumi.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-former-google-executive-takes-aim-at.html" rel="nofollow">https://camilancumicumi.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-former-google...</a>
I 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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>Neeva, on the other hand, focusses on promises and not evidence. Also, when you scratch the surface they no longer seem so privacy-friendly.<p>Just compare the privacy policies of both companies and make your own judgement about who is truly privacy-oriented or not:<p><a href="https://neeva.com/privacy" rel="nofollow">https://neeva.com/privacy</a>
<a href="https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy/#numbered" rel="nofollow">https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy/#numbered</a>
<a href="https://mullvad.net/en/help/privacy-policy/" rel="nofollow">https://mullvad.net/en/help/privacy-policy/</a><p>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.
The main problem with search today is the lack of organically appearing "curation" found on the early internet.<p>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.<p>Until the "curation problem" is solved I am not hopeful of a search engine producing excellent results like Google did before 2010.<p>Stoked to try this out, but teaching a machine to curate is hard.
Is 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.<p><a href="https://neeva.com/about" rel="nofollow">https://neeva.com/about</a>
Suggested reading: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210625205312/https://neeva.com/privacy" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20210625205312/https://neeva.com...</a><p><pre><code> [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
</code></pre>
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.)<p>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.
I am always excited to hear about disruption in search. I would absolutely pay for a private search engine provided the results are useful!<p>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.<p>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!
What’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?<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.
I 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.<p>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.<p>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.
This 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.
Genuine question: I use DDG which also touts privacy and is free. Yes it shows ads, I’m told they are non tracking.<p>What benefit does Neeva provide over it?
Neevabot seems to deliberately 'misunderstand' robots txt files excluding it:<p><a href="https://neeva.com/neevabot" rel="nofollow">https://neeva.com/neevabot</a><p>They go crawling anywhere googlebot is allowed...<p>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?
If this is as accurate as Google was ~2008 but without the ads, I will have to seriously consider paying for the service.<p>Mostly because my time is valuable and I support the alignment of user interests with product interests
Their "privacy promise" page <a href="https://neeva.com/digital-bill-of-rights" rel="nofollow">https://neeva.com/digital-bill-of-rights</a> talks a lot, but doesn't say much about what <i>they</i> do.
According 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.
For those who have joined, I'm curious about the following query:<p>Are women better than men at limbo?<p>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.<p>0. <a href="https://www.middleendian.com/limbogoogle.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.middleendian.com/limbogoogle.png</a><p>1. <a href="https://www.middleendian.com/limbobing.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.middleendian.com/limbobing.png</a>
This 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
search 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.
I 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.
tldr; This appears to be run by 4 ex-googlers, see bottom of > <a href="https://neeva.com/" rel="nofollow">https://neeva.com/</a>