Neeva - Ad-free, private search

Congratulations on the launch. More options in this space have been sorely missing.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Neeva 😄 but Google's failure to stick to its mission has bothered me enough to leave a comment. A while back I wondered if anyone had taken them on—beyond the usual suspects and the likes of DuckDuckGo and Ecosia (with their interesting ad revenue going towards planting trees model!) In that search, I ended up coming across Cuil* (obviously their search 👀 for product-market-fit didn't go as planned https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/... — some interesting internet trivia for you there 😄 As I then reflected on Google's unchanged mission—"to organise the world's information"—and dominance in search, I thought to myself this isn't organised, it's arranged yes, but organised? Well not so much. I have high expectations when I think about how search would look if Google was even close to its mission. The other week I was thinking, heck I'd pay (money not attention;)) for a better search engine and thought to myself why isn't there one. Mind you I didn't go looking, call it inertia and perhaps it was more of a fleeting thought. But here we are. So I guess this is the acid test (for me and many others). Will I end up paying for search? This brings me to a question, privacy aside (and I appreciate that part is core to Neeva's proposition), but how will you handle indexing or rather SEO? Beyond ads, I find heavily optimised SEO results to be a bigger issue. Many organic results are ads in a different guise. Sometimes that's fine when the quality of the content is on point, but increasing I don't believe I'm getting results organised by quality. By which I mean scored on depth and richness, and perhaps personalised (or better yet personal taste—there's a difference in my book). But the status quo shouldn't be all that surprising as the incentives aren't aligned. I'm not expecting unbiased results but, by way of example, a search for best anything will be dominated by whoever is selling that service or product rather than whoever wrote the best takes (without gaming SEO in mind). As a workaround of sorts, I end up using advanced Google search in an attempt to unearth better results in none obvious ways or I leverage other platforms or communities. But it's a bit of a faff. So paid certainly sounds intriguing. Now, I'm pretty sure the above question is already answered. I need to spend a bit of time reading through the responses properly. I'm asking more from the point of view of airing my thoughts as a would-be customer. Semi rhetorical if you like 😆 but I won't complain if someone answers it. All in, exciting to see someone making what others might believe is an unthinkable move—paid search—but not as we know it. I can see the one-liner now. "Paid search—but not as you know it." :) * I'm sure a lot of 100s of startups have tackled this over the years, but Cuil caught my eye given the Irish connection and story. PS. @vivek_raghunathan1 and @sridhar_ramaswamy1 and team it's great to see the manner of this launch. Plenty of the team on hand to answer questions, respond to feedback and not shying away from some of the tough questions being asked—which to be fair are all great challenges in themselves and the right questions people should be asking.

I've been using Neeva now for about 6 months as a beta tester and really love it. I literally find everything on Neeva that I would find on Google, meaning it has become my default search engine, whether for general search, image search, local search, video and more. And the no-tracking/no-ads experience is critical and an experience I don't want to stop having with search. I understand I may eventually have to pay a few bucks a month for this at some point, but, assuming the price isn't really high, I think it would be absolutely worth it.

wow this is good

I was looking for something like this

@sridhar_ramaswamy1 - Huge congrats on this launch! I just signed up and played around with it, interface looks really clean and compelling. Nice work!!

Sounds like a great idea.

A good idea. I hope the size of the index you will have comparable from Google.

Wow brilliant idea! Good luck on your launch!

Really excited to test this out. The evolution of Google's search results page is pretty disappointing (tell me the UX rationale for making ads look like organic results? And limiting data for marketers about what terms drive clicks on organic results but not paid results? I could go on...), so having another search product in the market that takes a very different approach to the experience and to monetization is super appealing. I'm especially interested to see people's willingness to pay for an ad-free search experience! Best of luck to you, @vivekraghuram and team.