Neeva, Google's dream competitor, stops

Neeva, the potential Google competitor, will permanently shut down its search engine on June 2. The startup, which seemed to have a real chance of seriously attacking Google Search's supremacy, tried to build a different kind of search engine, but couldn't get it done commercially. Or as one of the founders said, "We've found that it's one thing to build a search engine, and quite another to convince users of the need to move to a better choice." Neeva says it will focus on AI from now on.
The quoted founder is one of the reasons why Neeva looked promising: as a former head of Google's advertising department, he should know better than anyone how to build and monetize a search engine. And Neeva's search engine was even way ahead of Google in some ways, such as replacing the 10 blue links with a more visually structured page. When you searched on Neeva, that search data was only used to provide better results. In addition, there was also an incognito mode where even the results were no longer improved based on your previous behavior. Also, no location history was kept.
In an earlier blog from September 2021, we also presented Neeva as a possible contender to dethrone Google. Read more here about the potential Neeva had and the benefits it offered (‘consumer first’, decide who you want to see first, etc.).

Google turns out to be (too) powerful?

But despite the addition of an AI chatbot to the Neeva search engine and Google's inconveniences (the hard-to-find settings and the chaos of the Chrome Web Store), it's still hard to argue with Google. After all, Google is making billion-dollar deals to be the default search engine on all kinds of devices. In addition, you had to pay for Neeva, but "Contrary to popular belief, making users pay was easier than making them try a new search engine," the founders wrote.
And so (again) a potentially very good idea falls on the harsh reality of Google's dominance. Neeva's search engine will shut down on June 2. Any unused subscription fees will be refunded and all user data deleted.
The fight against Google's dominance, meanwhile, continues unabated: Bing continues to try hard to gain market share, and Brave, you.com and DuckDuckGo also try to gain share by deploying AI. But so far, Google's position still seems unassailable.