Who Can Beat Google in the Search Game? It Won’t Be Neeva

Having once set its sights on challenging Google’s search engine dominance, Neeva has admitted it won’t be able to beat the tech giant at its own game.

In a blog post(Opens in a new window) announcing Neeva’s intention to close down its consumer business, founders and former Googlers Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan say there is no longer a path toward creating a sustainable business in consumer search.

The service struggled to attract users amid a difficult economic climate. “As a result, over the next few weeks, we will be shutting down neeva.com and our consumer search product, and shifting to a new area of focus,” they write.

Founded in 2019, Neeva was marketed as a paid, ad-free and privacy-focused Google alternative. It launched in the US in 2021 and rolled out in the UK, France, and Germany last year.

Despite creating a visually attractive search engine that ditched Google’s 10 blue links for a page that emphasized human-created information, Neeva was unable to convince enough users to switch from search engine giants like Google and Microsoft’s Bing.

“Throughout this journey, we’ve discovered that it is one thing to build a search engine, and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better choice,” Ramaswamy and Raghunathan say.

Contrary to popular belief, “convincing users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place,” they add.

Neeva is “shifting to a new area of focus,” which is likely to be something related to LLM (Large Language Modelling) and related to its reported planned acquisition by cloud-computing-based data cloud company Snowflake, The Verge notes(Opens in a new window).

Neeva’s search engine will shut down on June 2. As TechCrunch notes(Opens in a new window), Neeva had also been working on a standalone generative AI search app called Gist, which have launched on Android, but had its planned March iOS launch repeatedly delayed without explanation.

In the blog post, Neeva’s co-founders say subscribers to its premium search engine service will receive a refund for the unused portion of their subscription and Neeva will delete all user data.