Neeva to shut down its search engine, focus on machine learning, artificial intelligence

It has been announced that Neeva, a search engine co-founded in 2019 by former Google employees Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, has closed its doors.

Originally, the search engine was expected to compete with the technology giant Google by providing ad-free and privacy-focused search results.

During the launch of the search engine, the co-founders stated that they would remove all of the user data they have, and added that they are proud of being the first search engine to integrate Large Language Model (LLM) systems with their search engine to provide cited, real-time AI answers to a majority of queries.

Among the reasons cited by the co-founders were the difficulty of persuading regular users to choose a different search engine and the 'unnecessary friction' involved in changing default search settings

"Over the past year, we’ve seen the clear, pressing need to use LLMs effectively, inexpensively, safely, and responsibly. We are actively exploring how we can apply our search and LLM expertise in these settings, and we will provide updates on the future of our work and our team in the next few weeks," Neeva said.