Ex-Google executives built ad-free search engine shuts down

The ad-free private search engine co-founded by former Google employees has announced it is shutting down

Updated - May 22, 2023 04:43 pm IST

Ex-Google executives built ad-free search engine shuts down

Ex-Google executives built ad-free search engine shuts down | Photo Credit: Neeva.com

The ad-free private search engine Neeva is shutting down after being unable to acquire more users, according to a statement by co-founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan on May 20.

The duo pointed out the difficulty of building a search engine with a “tiny” team of 50 people and spoke about their attempt to bring artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) to the Neeva search stack.

The co-founders claimed Neeva was the first search engine to “provide cited, real-time AI answers to a majority of queries early this year.”

However, they said it was challenging to bring more users onboard and convince them to give Neeva a chance.

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“Contrary to popular belief, 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,” they said.

The co-founders also cited the macroeconomic situation and said neeva.com and the consumer search product would be shutting down. All user data will be deleted as part of the shutdown process.

Sridhar Ramaswamy was the former Google ads head, and Vivek Raghunathan was vice president of engineering at Google before the duo started their ad-free search venture.

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