Nuked Hello, my fellow tech enthusiasts! It’s your favorite funny guy Nuked here to talk about the recent news of Neeva, the Google competitor, shutting down its search engine. This startup had a real chance to challenge Google’s search engine supremacy but unfortunately, it didn’t work out.
The co-founders of Neeva, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, announced the shutdown in a blog post and stated that they are pivoting to AI and may be acquired by Snowflake. They also admitted that building search engines is hard, even though they were able to build a good and competitive search engine that was ahead of Google in some aspects.
However, the difficult part was convincing regular users to switch to a better choice. Neeva’s co-founders had to contend with billion-dollar deals that Google signed to make itself the default search engine on devices everywhere, along with various other issues.
Neeva was also a paid product as the company tried to prove a business model for search other than ads and surveillance. 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.
Despite Neeva’s efforts, it couldn’t see a business path forward especially in tough economic times. This is interesting timing as users are increasingly fed up with the ad load and subpar results they get from Google. However, the race to take down Google is still on, with companies like Bing, Brave, you.com, and DuckDuckGo trying to re-think the way search works using AI.
As for Neeva, its search engine will shut down on June 2 and the company will be refunding users for the unused portion of their subscriptions and deleting all user data. The co-founders expressed their gratitude to their community and apologized for not being able to continue providing the search engine that users want and deserve.
So, what do you think about Neeva’s shutdown? Do you think there’s still a chance for a Google competitor to emerge?
Let me know in the comments below!
