a shuts down its ad-free search engine
Neeva will close on June 2. Search engine Neeva launched in less than two years.
According to Sridhar Raghunathan and Vivek Raagathan, the founders of Neeva, its failure was due to their inability to attract sufficient users, the rise LLMs, and the current economic climate.
Tweeted The following.
We are extremely proud of what we have accomplished: building a search engine from scratch with a tiny team of fifty people and releasing the world’s first LLM powered answer engine that produced reliable citations. We are extremely proud of our accomplishments: we built a search engine with only fifty people, and released the first LLM-powered answer engine in the world that produced reliable citations.
Why do we care? Neeva had a tiny search market share, but offered a Google alternative, which was always advisable. It’s difficult to get people away from Google, and this is true for all Google alternatives.
History Neeva. Founded in 2019, we would not report on until June 2020. Neeva would be 100% free of advertising and subscription-supported. Neeva said that it would not track users and personalization will be done without data mining.
Ramaswamy felt that the emphasis on advertising revenue had compromised the quality and usability of Google’s results. They wanted to “return search to its users”.
Neeva began offering to U.S. users in June 2021. Users will be charged $4.95 per month. Neeva launched a basic subscription in 2022 to increase its user base.
The company launched NeevaAI in January, an AI-based search engine that provides summaries of queries and citations. This beat Microsoft’s New Bing launch announced on February 7 and Google’s Search Generative Experience, which hasn’t been publicly released yet.
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