Who Can Beat Google in the Search Game? It Won't Be Neeva
Having once set its sights on challenging Google’s search engine dominance, Neeva has admitted it won’t be able to beat the tech giant at its original game.
In a blog post(Opens in a new window) announcing Neeva’s intention to close down its consumer business, founders and former Googlers Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan said there was no longer a path towards creating a sustainable business in consumer search after struggling to attract users amid a difficult economic climate.
“As a result,” the founder said, “over the next few weeks, we will be shutting down neeva.com and our consumer search product, and shifting to a new area of focus.”
Neeva was founded in 2019 and was marketed as a paid ad-free and privacy-focused alternative to Google upon its official US launch in 2021, before being rolled out in 2022 in the UK, France, and Germany.
Despite successfully creating a visually attractive new search engine that ditched Google’s 10 blue links for a page that emphasized human-created information, Neeva was unable to convince enough users to switch from search engine giants like Google and Microsoft’s Bing.
Ramaswamy and Raghunathan elaborated: “Throughout this journey, we’ve discovered 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 choice.”
Contrary to popular belief,” the co-founders added in the blog post, “convincing users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place.”
By moving away from being a consumer-led business, Neeva says it is “shifting to a new area of focus,” which, as The Verge notes(Opens in a new window) is
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