Neeva Announces It Will Be Shutting Down

Neeva has shocked numerous people across the globe by announcing that it will be shutting down all its consumer search operations.

The company is well-known for offering privacy-focused and ad-free search engine services to users everywhere. Thus, its plans to close down have come as a shock to many.

The company had been co-founded by the former executives of Google, Vivek Raghunathan, and Sridhar Ramaswamy, who took to breaking the bad news via their website.

The Journey Of The Ad-Free Search Engine

Launched back in 2019, the ad-free search engine wanted to cause a disruption in the market for search engines.

This was because it offered higher user privacy as compared to the rest. But best of all, it was free of ads and users could browse in peace.

The reason behind the company’s birth was that Ramaswamy believed that if search engines were overly reliant on ads, their quality of search results would quickly deteriorate.

As the CEO of this new search company, he decided to create an experience that would be free of ads and offer good-quality results to searchers.

Therefore, Neeva was born with the mission to ensure that search was brought back in full to users. It decided to pay more attention to putting the interests of users first, as opposed to those of advertisers.

As a result, the company came up with a search stack, which it created from scratch. With only a team of 50 people, Neeva managed to stand tall against other more entrenched and larger organizations working on search engines.

By the time 2022 rolled around, the ad-free search engine had successfully integrated several Large Language Models (LLMs) into its newly curated search stack.

Consequently, Neeva turned out to be the first ever search engine to offer real-time and cited AI answers to a majority of queries from users.

Quick Growth And Downfall

In a small amount of time, the ad-free search engine managed to attract a significant user base.

Consequently, in a matter of four months after its launch, Neeva boasted more than half a million active users per month.

Despite the impressive growth that Neeva managed to achieve, the company had to undergo several difficult phases. This included trying to convince regular users to change their search habits.

Soon enough, the company cited that user acquisition had turned out to be one of its biggest challenges.

In addition, there was an unspecified change in the economic environment. Unsurprisingly, Neeva quoted this as a reason for its decision to stop operating.

According to the company, its shutdown process will include it deleting all the user data that it has collected over time.

Subscribers who have paid for Neeva Premium will also be receiving a refund for the portion of their subscriptions that has not yet been used.

On the other hand, Neeva has assured users that even though it is closing down its consumer search product, its journey has not come to an end.

The company has hinted that it will be shifting focus towards using LLMs in a safe, responsible, and inexpensive manner.