Neeva, which for a while looked like one of the startups with a real shot at challenging Google search supremacy, announced on Saturday that it was shutting down its search engine. The company says it’s moving to AI — and could be acquired by Snowflake, The Information reported — but mostly seems to think it’s failed.
“Building search engines is difficult,” Neeva co-founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan wrote in a blog post announcing the closure. (Ramaswamy, in particular, is one of the reasons Neeva seemed promising — as a longtime head of Google’s ads business, few people know better how to build and monetize search than he does.) But Neeva nailed it, he said. A good, competitive search engine has been built. It was actually way ahead of Google in some ways, like swapping out 10 blue links for a more visual page and emphasizing human-generated information.
But building the search engine was actually the easy part. “During this journey, we found that making a search engine is one thing and convincing regular users of the need to switch to a better choice is quite another,” continued Ramaswamy and Raghunathan.
Building the search engine was actually the easy part
I’ve spoken to Neeva’s co-founders several times over the past few years, and their list of complaints here is long and well-founded. They’ve had to contend with the multi-billion dollar deals Google signed to make itself the default search engine on all devices; the big “Are you sure you want to change?” pop-ups that appear whenever you try to set a new default browser or search engine; the difficulty of even finding these settings; the chaos in the Chrome Web Store; on and on and on. Anyone attempting to develop a new search engine faces a tremendous struggle.
Neeva was also a paid product as the company was trying to prove a different business model for search than advertising and surveillance. “Contrary to popular belief,” the co-founders wrote in the blog post, “actually, convincing users to pay for a better experience was less of a difficult problem than getting them to try a new search engine in the first place.” Combined with In a difficult economy, Neeva simply couldn’t see a future business path.
The timing here is really interesting. Neeva is closing at what may be the best time for emerging search engines in two decades. Increasingly, users are fed up with the ad glut and underperforming results they’re getting from Google, and AI chatbots like Bing and ChatGPT have turned everyone’s ideas about how to interact with the internet upside down. Neeva has also taken a gamble on this, developing a large language model-based system called Neeva AI, which in many ways is more useful than what you get from Bing or Bard. But even that wasn’t enough.
The race to overthrow Google is still on, of course: Bing continues to work hard to gain market share, and Brave recently announced that it’s now running entirely on its own search stack. Companies like you.com and DuckDuckGo are also trying to rethink how search works and are using AI to do so. But so far it looks like Google’s only real competitor is, well, Google.
Neeva’s search engine will be shut down on June 2nd. Going forward, Neeva will “shift to a new area of focus” likely based on LLM and related to the Snowflake acquisition. The company refunds users for the unused portion of their Neeva subscriptions and deletes all user data. “We are truly grateful to our community,” the co-founders wrote, “and we’re truly sorry that we can’t continue to provide the search engine you want and deserve.”