Neeva Shuts Down Its Search Engine
Neeva, a startup that once looked promising in challenging the supremacy of Google Search, announced on Saturday that it is shutting down its search engine and pivoting to Artificial Intelligence (AI). The company may also be on the verge of being acquired by Snowflake.
Co-founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, who announced the shutdown in a blog post, stated that building a search engine is a challenging task, but Neeva managed to construct a competitive product. The search engine, in some respects, was ahead of Google, as it replaced the traditional “10 blue links” with a more visual page and emphasized human-created information.
However, the most significant hurdle for Neeva was not the development of the search engine, but convincing regular users to switch to their service. “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,” the co-founders explained.
Neeva was a paid product, a unique approach in an industry dominated by ads and data surveillance. According to the co-founders, convincing users to pay for a better experience was less challenging than persuading them to try a new search engine. Combined with a tough economy, Neeva couldn’t see a feasible business path forward.
Interestingly, Neeva’s decision to shut down its search engine comes at a time when users are increasingly dissatisfied with the ad load and subpar results from Google, and AI chatbots like Bing and ChatGPT are revolutionizing the way people interact with the internet. Neeva also developed a large language model-based system, Neeva AI, which in many ways was more useful than the services provided by Bing or Bard. Yet, this was not enough to sustain the company’s search engine operations.
Neeva’s search engine will cease operations on June 2. The company will now shift to a new area of focus, which is likely to be based on Large Language Models (LLM) and potentially related to the Snowflake acquisition. Neeva has announced it will refund users for the unused portion of their subscriptions and delete all user data. In their statement, the co-founders expressed gratitude to their community and regret not being able to continue providing the search engine that users deserve
