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The End of Neeva Search


This morning I went to Neeva Search to see if rain was on the forecast. I had been up since 5 AM and noticed that there were quite a bit of clouds moving overhead. During a hike along a local nature trail I could feel the crispness of morning retreating and the mugginess of an oncoming rainstorm permeating the air. I never did search for what the weather was going to do; instead, I went to Neeva and saw that they were shutting down on June 2nd. 

I have quite liked Neeva Search from when I first started using it about six months ago. I was disheartened to see that it could not keep its doors (tubes? ports?) open any longer. What they were doing was admirable. Google has amassed a veritable fortune through what Shoshana Zuboff has dubbed "Surveillance Capitalism." It would be easy to try and replicate that, easier still to lay down and admit Google's dominance in the internet search and ad-server realm. Neeva tried to fight back.

The whole philosophy of Neeva was to have a user-focused internet search. They tracked you, but they did not sell that data to anyone. The whole point of their tracking was to improve their search engine and do better at getting you relevant results. At first they also offered integrations into personal cloud servers like Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive. Those integrations lost out in the Large Language Model, "AI" search-results wars that have played out recently. Neeva did not have that sweet sweet ad money so they had to pick and choose their battles. For what it's worth, Neeva AI was a great way of getting a quick rundown of possible results. I digress...It's clear that I was a fan of how Neeva oriented their business. It's clear that I am upset they have had to bow out of the internet search fight. 

It is not good for any of us that we are losing a small but important player in the internet search. Hopefully this is not the last nail in the coffin of internet searches that do not run on an advertisement-based business platform. We should not accept our data stream being the product. We should not have to hand over reems of personal data every time we turn on an internet-connected device. 

Yet...Yet that seems to be the direction we are going in.


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