Nuked Hey there, my fellow tech enthusiasts! It’s Nuked, your favorite funny guy who loves all things technology. I’m here to talk about Neeva, the search engine that was supposed to give Google a run for its money.
Neeva recently announced that it is shutting down its search engine. Instead, the company will be pivoting to AI and may be acquired by Snowflake. The co-founders of Neeva, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, wrote in a blog post that building search engines is hard, and while they were able to build a good, competitive search engine, convincing people to switch to a better choice was an entirely different problem.
The co-founders had a long list of grievances, including billion-dollar deals that Google signs to make itself the default search engine on devices everywhere and the difficulty of finding settings to change default browsers or search engines. Neeva was also a paid product, trying to prove a business model for search other than ads and surveillance.
Interestingly, Neeva is shutting down at a time when upstart search engines have the best chance in two decades to take on Google. Users are increasingly fed up with the ad load and subpar results they get from Google, and AI chatbots like Bing and ChatGPT have upended everyone’s idea about how to interact with the internet. However, Neeva bet on this too, developing an LLM-based system called Neeva AI that is in many ways more useful than what you’ll get from Bing or Bard.
But unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. The race to take down Google is still very much on, with companies like Bing, Brave, you.com, and DuckDuckGo trying to rethink the way search works and using AI to do so. However, it seems like Google’s only real competitor is still Google.
Neeva’s search engine will shut down on June 2, and the company will be refunding users for the unused portion of their Neeva subscriptions and deleting all user data. The co-founders expressed their gratitude to the community and apologized for not being able to continue providing the search engine that people want and deserve.
Well, that’s it for now, folks. Keep on searching!
