Neeva, which for a while looked like one of the startups with a real chance to challenge the supremacy of Google Search, announced on Saturday that it was shutting down its search engine. The company says it revolves around AI — and Snowflake might get, The information reported — but most seem to believe it failed.
“Search engines are hard to build,” Neeva co-founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan wrote in a blog post announcing the closure. (Ramaswamy in particular is part of the reason Neeva seems so promising — as the longtime head of Google’s ad business, few people are better equipped to figure out how to develop and monetize search than he is.) But Neeva did it, he said. It built a great, competitive search engine. It’s actually ahead of Google in some aspects, like replacing the 10 blue links for a more visual page and emphasizing human-generated information.
But building the search engine is actually the easy part. “Throughout this journey, we’ve discovered that it’s one thing to build a search engine, and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better option,” continued Ramaswamy and Raghunathan.
Building a search engine is actually the easy part
I’ve spoken to Neeva’s co-founders several times over the past few years, and their list of grievances here is long and well-founded. They had to contend with the billion-dollar deal Google signed to be the default search engine on devices everywhere; the big “are you sure you want to change?” popups that appear whenever you try to set a new default browser or search engine; the difficulty of finding the settings in the first place; the mess that is the Chrome Web Store; on and on and on. Anyone trying to build a new search engine is fighting an enormous uphill battle.
Neeva is also a paid product, as the company has tried to prove a business model for search other than ads and tracking. “Contrary to popular belief,” the co-founders wrote in the blog post, “convincing users to pay for a better experience is actually a less difficult problem than getting them to try a new search engine in the first place.” Combine that with a tough economy, and Neeva just couldn’t see a forward business path.
The timing here is really interesting. Neeva is closing in on what might be the best moment in two decades for search engine startups. Users are more fed up with the ad load and subpar results they get from Google, and AI chatbots like Bing and ChatGPT have changed everyone’s idea of how to interact on the internet. Neeva also bet on this, building a large language model-based system called Neeva AI that is in many ways more useful than what you can get from Bing or Bard. But that’s not enough either.
The race to unseat Google is still on, of course: Bing continues to push to gain market share, and Brave recently revealed that it now runs entirely on its own search stack. Companies like it you.com and DuckDuckGo is also trying to rethink the way we search, and using AI to do it. But right now, it looks like Google’s only real competitor is, well, Google.
Neeva’s search engine will shut down on June 2. Going forward, Neeva will “move to a new area of focus,” which seems likely to be LLM-based and related to the Snowflake acquisition. The company will refund users for the unused portion of their Neeva subscriptions, and delete all user data. “We’re truly grateful to our community,” the co-founders wrote, “and we’re truly sorry we couldn’t continue to provide the search engine you love and deserve.”