Google is the king of Internet searches, it is no secret. It is in most web browsers as the default search engine, and where it is not, many users, those who know how to do it, return to Google. There are companies that intend to stand up to it, such as Microsoft with Bing, Brave Technologies with Brave Search or DuckDuckGo with its own search engine, but they have little to do if they do not propose something different. For example, greater privacy, something that promised Neva and he was serving, but less than two years.
The company launched in 2021, and it looked so good, at least privacy-wise, that even Vivaldi added it as an option default in its v4.2. That is, the option included by default, not that it was the default search engine. What is happening is that literally all of us are realizing that the search and use of the Internet in general is changing. In just over six months, OpenAI has shown that artificial intelligence is the new direction.
Neeva was introduced about two years ago
Since yesterday, Saturday May 20, when entering neeva.com we see what appears in the header capture: will close on June 2in less than two weeks. I am not sure that it will close completely, since the company will continue to exist, but its search engine will cease to exist. Just like they publish Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, It's one thing to create a search engine, and quite another to convince ourselves to change.
It does not matter that they explain the benefits to us, and that it is easy to change from one engine to another, and that even at the beginning of this year they have added an option that shows answers to our searches. WhatsApp knows this better than anyone: making us change is very difficult, although Telegram, to give an example, gives it a thousand turns.
The next step will be to jump on the bandwagon of artificial intelligence, but fully, and not as part of a search engine. They are not clear about what they are going to do, but they do know that they should use what they have learned in the field of search and LLM for their next product/project. And this to make a clean slate, seems good to me. Others, like DuckDuckGo or Brave Search, in a panic have done little more than put in bold the answers to our questions, but all within the search engine results.
Return of subscriptions
For Premium users from Neeva, they say that they will receive an amount that will depend on what they have not used since the moment of payment. iOS users should go to reportproblem.apple.com to request a refund.
It remains to be seen what they end up offering us, but one thing is clear: the Internet, at least the part where we obtain information, is no longer what it used to be...