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).
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
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.
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.
