The ad-free Google alternative Neeva will be closed. The two founders of the search engine announced this in a blog entry and justified the step with the economic situation, among other things. There is no longer a way towards a sustainable business, write Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan. However, it was also noticed that it is not only difficult to build a search engine. Convincing people of the need to switch to a better alternative is another thing altogether. In the end, that was even more difficult than finding paying customers, the two write. They now want to market the developed AI technology to companies.
Too few users for Google alternative
They really believed that there was enough room for a search engine model that puts users first when searching the Internet and offers them an ad-free technology. With a team of just 50 people, major hurdles were overcome and the potential of AI text generators was already recognized a year ago. Neeva is proud to have built the first search engine to provide AI answers with source information for a majority of search queries.
But that wasn’t enough either, simply too few people switched from Google and the other search engines to Neeva. Changing the default search engine turned out to be unnecessarily difficult. It was also a challenge to explain the difference between a search engine and a browser to people. This is one of the reasons why it will end on June 2nd, paid subscriptions should be repaid proportionately.
Ramaswamy and Raghunathan had both worked in senior positions in Google’s and YouTube’s advertising departments, respectively. They had the idea for Neeva “while drinking coffee and hiking together”. They were dissatisfied with the large amount of ads and paid links on Google. Neeva should be completely without advertising and instead be financed as a freemium offer through paid subscriptions. In order to be able to use all functions, an account was required, which was free in the basic version. A subscription was required for the rest. The German-language offer from Neeva was only added at the beginning of October.
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