Potential Google competitor Neeva is shutting down its search engine

Neeva, which for a while looked like one of the startups with a real chance to challenge Google search supremacy, announced on Saturday that it was shutting down its search engine. The company says it’s pivoting to AI — and could be acquired by Snowflake, Information informed of — but mostly it looks like it failed.

“Building a search engine is hard,” wrote Neeva co-founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan. A blog post announcing the shutdown, (Ramaswamy in particular is part of the reason Neeva seemed promising — as the longtime head of Google’s advertising business, few people are better equipped to figure out how to make search results.) and monetize.) But Neeva did it, he said. It made a good, competitive search engine. It was actually way ahead of Google in some ways, such as swapping out the 10 blue links for a more visual page and emphasizing human-generated information.

But building the search engine was actually the easy part. Ramaswamy and Raghunathan further added, “Throughout this journey, we have found that it is one thing to build a search engine, and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better alternative.”

I’ve spoken with the co-founders of Neeva several times over the years, and here’s their list of complaints, long and well-founded. They’ve had to contend with billion-dollar Google signals to make themselves the default search engine on devices everywhere; Huge “Are you sure you want to change?” Popups appear whenever you try to set a new default browser or search engine; Difficulty finding those settings at first; The mess that is the Chrome Web Store; On and on and on. Anyone trying to build a new search engine is fighting an uphill battle to scale.

Niva was also a paid product, as the company tried to prove a business model for search in addition to ads and surveillance. “Contrary to popular belief,” the co-founders wrote in the blog post, “persuading users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem than getting them to try a new search engine in the first place.” Combine this with a tough economy, and Neeva couldn’t see a business path forward.

The timing here is really interesting. In what may be the best moment in two decades for reinvented search engines, Niva is shutting down. are users fed up fast With the ad load and subpar results from Google, and AI chatbots like Bing and ChatGPT have changed the way everyone thinks about interacting with the Internet. Niva bet on it too, developing a huge language model-based system called Niva AI that is in many ways more useful than what you’d get from Bing or Bard. But even that was not enough.

Of course, the race to take down Google is still on: Bing is fighting hard to gain market share, and Brave Recently Promoted that it now runs entirely on its own search stack. companies like you come And DuckDuckGo is also trying to rethink the way search works, and is 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 2. Going forward, Neeva is “moving to a new area of ​​focus,” which is likely to be LLM-based and related to the Snowflake acquisition. The Company will refund users for the unused portion of their Niva subscriptions, and delete all user data. “We’re truly grateful for our community,” the co-founders wrote, “and we’re truly sorry we haven’t been able to continue to be the search engine you want and deserve.”