Neeva search engine dubbed to be a Google competitor is shutting down. To those unaware, Neeva search engine was founded by Ex-Google executives Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan. The term Neeva is a Tamil word, which translates to “You Come”. The news has turned out to be a big disappointment for the Tamil community.
The Neeva search engine and its associated products will shut down on June 2. You have time until June 2 to explore all the features after that the site will not be accessible. Interestingly, Neeva was named one of Time’s Best Inventions of 2021. Neeva was one of the top 100 Best Inventions that are making the world better, smarter, and even fun.
Commenting on the development, Sridhar and Vivek disclosed that they are unable to convince users to pay for a better user experience when it comes to search. The adverse competition from ChatGPT, Google Bard, Bing AI has caused problems for Neeva. The company revealed that the users are not willing to pay for search when the same is available for free. Moreover, the current economic environment made it difficult for the business to run effectively.
Neeva was launched during the COVID-19 pandemic as a competitor to Google Search. Neeva was primarily tagged as an ad-free and privacy-focused search engine. However, the users will have to pay $4.95 after the first three months of free trial. It looks like a majority of users avoided payment after trial since information is now available for free via the traditional search engine and AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Google Bard AI. The company revealed that acquiring users is really hard and there is no choice other than to close down the company.
In a blog post, Neeva announced that they will be shutting down the official website and their consumer search product. The management is shifting to new focus area. The company will refund the unused portion of your subscription if you have Neeva premium. The product team will delete all user data to protect the privacy of users. Alternatively, you can request a refund by navigating to reportaproblem.apple.com but this procedure is applicable only for Apple iOS subscribers.
Going forward, Neeva will work to integrate search with LLM language models. We don’t know when the company will provide updates but the chances are less considering the failure of Neeva search. The top management has thanked Neeva team for their time, effort, and dedication. There were challenges but the team has cracked them effectively.
That being said, we now have tools like ChatGPT, Bing AI, Google Bard, Quora Poe that enhance the ultimate productivity of the people. You can now quickly generate quality content via ChatGPT within minutes. Moreover, you can also create product reviews easily with the help of useful free software tools like ChatGPT.