JAKARTA - Neeva, a startup that initially looked to have a real chance to challenge Google Search's dominance, announced on Saturday 20 May that it would close their search engine.
The company said it was turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and was likely to be acquired by Snowflake, as reported by The Information, but apparently they felt failed.
"Building a search engine is difficult," wrote Neeva founders, Sridhar Ramaswamy and VivekUSHnathan, in a blog post announcing the shutdown. Ramaswamy is best known as the former head of Google's advertising business, so not many people are more experienced in building and monetizing search engines like him.
However, Neeva did, they said. They managed to build a good and competitive search engine. In fact, in some ways, they are superior to Google, such as replacing 10 blue links with more visual pages and emphasizing information made by humans.
However, building a search engine is actually an easy part. "Throughout this journey, we found that building a search engine is one thing, but convincing regular users to switch to better choices is completely different," continued Ramaswamy and capynathan, as quoted by The Verge.
Neeva juga harus berhadapan dengan kesepakatan miliar dolar yang ditandatangani oleh Google untuk membuatnya menjadi mesin pencari default di berbagai perangkat;men besar "dapat Anda yakin ingin mengubah?" yang muncul setiap kali Anda mencoba mengatur browser atau mesin pencari default baru; kesulitan menemukan setempatan tersebut pada awalnya; kerusuhan yang ada di Chrome Web Store; dan selanjutnya. Siapa orang yang mencoba membangun mesin pencaran baru sedang berjuang melawan hambatan yang sangat besar.
Neeva is also a paid product, as the company tries to prove a business model for search engines in addition to advertising and surveillance.
"Contrary to popular beliefs," the founders wrote in the blog post, "convincing users to pay for a better experience turns out to be an easier problem than making them try out a new search engine at first." Coupled with the difficult economic situation, Neeva doesn't see a possible way of business going forward.
This closing time is very interesting. Neeva closed at a time that may be the best moment in the last two decades for a new search engine. Users are getting fed up with excessive advertising and the unsatisfactory search results provided by Google.
Meanwhile, AI chatbots such as Bing and ChatGPT have changed the way people interact with the internet. Neeva is also betting on this, by developing a large language model-based system called Neeva AI which is in many ways more useful than Bing or Bard. However, that's not enough.
The race to overthrow Google is still continuing, of course: Bing continues to strive to gain market share, and Brave recently highlighted that they are now fully using their own search infrastructure.
Companies like you.com and DuckDuckGo are also trying to rethink how searches work using AI. However, until now, Google's only real competitor is Google itself.
Neeva's search engine will close on June 2. In the future, Neeva will "focus on new areas," most likely related to LLM and related to the acquisition of Snowflake.
The company will return the money to users for unused parts of their Neeva subscriptions, and delete all user data. "We are very grateful to our community," the founders wrote, "and we sincerely apologize for not being able to continue providing the search engine you want and deserves."
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