Neeva, a privacy-focused, ad-free, subscription-based consumer search engine, has announced that it will shut down on June 2, 2023. Founders emphasized new focus on AI innovation and business applications. This may change the company’s positioning. Get.
Google’s former VP of Advertising Sridhar Ramaswamy and YouTube’s former VP of Monetization Vivek Raghunathan are working together to build better, more personalized search experiences and encourage users to stop searching Google. started an ambitious project to persuade. In April 2021, Coywolf News announced the premiere of a new ad-free privacy search engine (still in private beta) called Neeva.
A few months later, Neeva officially launched, but struggled to gain traction. Despite actively adding new features and updates, LLMs AI Despite having a lot of features, it just wasn’t enough to convince people to pay for a Google search alternative. Less than two years after its launch, Mr. Ramaswami and Mr. Ragunathan had to make the difficult decision to close Neeva.
On May 20, 2023, Ramaswamy sent an email to Neeva’s customers informing them of Neeva’s closure. In his message, Ramaswami blamed the hyper-competitive environment and the difficulty of educating users on why his company’s solution is better and worth switching to. Despite the team’s efforts and innovation in search, he said: AINeeva was no longer on the road to a sustainable business model in consumer search.
In a letter to customers, Ramaswami hinted that Neeva would continue as a separate product for businesses, and beyond just being a search engine for consumers, the company may still have a future. .
According to information, Snowflake has signed a letter of intent to acquire search startup Neeva.
Snowflake is reportedly interested in Niva IP related to AI. Therefore, it is likely that Neva will continue in some form through the acquisition.
Neeva will be closed on June 2, 2023.
A message to Neeva customers announcing the end of their consumer search engine
A Tough Decision: Neeva’s Next Steps
I am writing to inform you that in the coming weeks, we will be shutting down neeva.com and our consumer search product and transitioning to new areas of focus.
We launched Neeva with a mission to bring search back to users. Having worked in search and search advertising for over a decade, we truly believed there was room for a search model that puts the interests of the user first, not the advertiser: a private, ad-free experience.
Building a search engine is hard. That’s even harder with his small team of 50 people facing a robust organization with limitless resources. We overcame these obstacles and built our search stack from the ground up, running crawls to capture petabytes of information from the web and using it to power our independent search stack.
In early 2022, the future impact of generative AI and LLM became clear. We embarked on an ambitious effort to seamlessly incorporate LLM into our search stack. We brought the Neeva team together around this vision to create the answer engine. We are proud to be the first search engine to provide cited real-time AI answers for the majority of queries earlier this year.
But throughout this journey, I’ve learned that building a search engine is one thing, and convincing regular users of the need to switch to a better option is quite another. From the unnecessary hassle required to change default search settings to the challenges in getting people to understand the difference between search engines and browsers, user acquisition has been really hard. Contrary to popular belief, convincing someone to pay for a better experience is actually a lot less difficult than getting them to try a new search engine in the first place. .
These headwinds and a different economic environment have made it clear that there is no longer a path to building a sustainable business in consumer search.
Deletes all user data as part of shutdown. If you have a paid subscription to Neeva Premium, any unused portion of your subscription will be refunded. You can find more information in our FAQ. For Apple iOS subscribers, please visit https://reportaproblem.apple.com/ to request a refund as soon as possible.
Neeva has a passionate community of customers and members who have supported us over the last few years. They tried early previews of our features, gave us thoughtful feedback, and gave us the love and encouragement that every young team needs. We truly appreciate our community and we truly regret that we cannot continue to provide the search engine you have come to expect and deserve.
what’s next for niva
Over the past year, we have recognized a clear and pressing need for effective, low-cost, safe and responsible use of LLM. Many of the technologies we pioneered with smaller models, reduced size, reduced latency and lower cost deployments are what businesses really want and need today. We are actively exploring how our search and LLM expertise can be applied to these settings, and will provide updates on our work and the future of our team in the coming weeks. It’s a schedule.
Vivek and I would like to thank the Neeva team for their time, effort, and dedication to build Neeva. It has been an honor and an honor to take on this challenge with all of you and I couldn’t have chosen a better friend or colleague to join me on this journey.
– Sridhar Ramaswami
Neeva CEO and Co-Founder
