Search engine from ex-Googlers starts without advertising and tracking – for 5 dollars a month
Neeva is a search engine that has been awaited with great interest. After all, they designed the ex-Googlers who played a key role in the Google search. Now it is there.
There’s now an alternative to Google Search in the United States, made by the people who did Google Search – at least in part. Neeva goes a completely different way than the Google equivalent called Search.
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Google “littered” with advertisements
While the Google search is free, the use of Neeva costs around five US dollars per month after the first three free months. Neeva does not place any advertising for this and does not track its visitors or the search results they click.
Exuberant advertising and increasingly intrusive tracking have moved the Neeva makers to submit their own draft of a search engine. Your belief: “Mainstream search engines no longer primarily serve the user. They’re littered with ads that push organic search results all the way down. What began as a well-intentioned way of organizing the world’s information has grown into a company that focuses most of its resources on monetizing clicks to help advertisers. “
The promise of a “clean search”: Neeva, right. (Image: Neeva)
That is the Neeva concept
Neeva wants to do it completely differently, namely ad-free, private and customizable. The difference that is visible at first glance is that Neeva is only available for a fee. Users have to pay for the best search results, while on Google, companies pay for the top spots in the search.
For Neeva it is obvious that search financed by advertising can never bring the best results because financial motives would always decide on the ranking. After an average Google search, around 40 percent of the results should consist of advertising.
Neeva, on the other hand, wants to use its own algorithms to sort pages according to real relevance and not according to the amount of money that the page operator is willing to pay for a place above the “fold”, ie in the immediately visible upper search results area. Conversely, Neeva wants content creators to participate in their own sales with up to 20 percent.
“Neeva was built on the premise that search should focus on the consumer and only on the consumer, not advertisers,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO and co-founder of Neeva. “Search results should always prioritize finding the best answer to a consumer’s question – not selling ads or tracking online behavior. Today’s launch of our subscription-based model is the first step towards creating a workable search alternative for consumers based on trust and transparency. “
Neeva offers more than just ad-free search
In addition to focusing on search results without advertising, Neeva also wants to make life difficult for its competitors in other ways. The browser extension that Neeva users use to search offers a built-in tracker blocker and allows completely anonymous searches.
If you want, you can connect Neeva to your e-mail accounts, calendars and cloud storage platforms in order to be able to find content from these areas via the Neeva search slot. News sources and retailers can also be defined as prioritized sources. Their results would then be shown as a priority.
Sources to be considered can be assigned more or less priority. (Image: Neeva)
Neeva is bringing back a function that Google gave up years ago, namely the private dashboard as the starting point for the search. Neeva users can keep up to date on everything from stock selection to the delivery status of packages on this so-called homepage.
More clever features are in the pipeline. For example, Neeva will be able to offer subscription to e-mail newsletters directly from a search results page. The operators are looking for partners from a wide variety of areas in order to safely integrate their offers into Neeva.
Neeva works via a browser extension
The linchpin of the new service is a browser-based extension that works with Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Edge and Safari on all platforms. There is a separate app for iOS.
It is unclear when the service will also be available in Europe, but should not be expected anytime soon. At the moment the service is working on filling its own search index in order to be less dependent on other providers. He will certainly proceed according to language regions.
Although the Neeva crawler is already on the move, the service is currently still getting most of its results from Microsoft’s Bing index. The search engine from Redmond, with a market share of around six percent, is in second place behind Google with a market share of around 90 percent.
Does a subscription search have a chance?
The question remains as to the potential for success. Here Neeva will have a hard time asserting itself against the free search giant Google with an amount of around $ 60 per year and a smaller search index. Of course, it will ultimately depend on the result.
If Neeva succeeds in offering results that are far more useful than the market leader, there might be enough paying customers. Google will replace it Neeva but certainly never.
