Neeva: Search engine by ex-Googlers launches without advertising and tracking - for $5 a month

Neeva is a search engine that was awaited with great interest. After all, it was designed by those ex-Googlers who had significantly contributed to Google search. Now it's here.

In the United States of America, there is now an alternative to Google search that comes from the same people who created Google search - at least in part. However, Neeva is taking a completely different approach than its counterpart called Search, which remains with Google.

Google "littered" with advertising

While Google Search is free of charge, the use of Neeva costs around five US dollars per month after the first three free months. In return, Neeva does not display any advertising and does not perform any tracking of its visitors or clicked search results.

Excessive advertising and increasingly intrusive tracking have prompted the Neeva makers to present their own design of a search engine. Their belief: "Mainstream search engines no longer primarily serve the user. They're littered with ads that push organic search results to the bottom. What started as a well-intentioned way to organize the world's information has morphed into a business that focuses most of its resources on monetizing clicks to support advertisers."

This is the Neeva concept

Neeva wants to be completely different, namely ad-free, private and customizable. The difference that is visible at first glance is that Neeva is only available on a pay-as-you-go basis. 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 ad-supported search can never bring the best results, because financial motives would always decide the ranking. For example, around 40 percent of the results after an average Google search are said to 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 the page operator is willing to pay for a place above the "fold," i.e., in the immediately visible upper search results area. Conversely, Neeva rather wants content creators to share in their own revenue by up to 20 percent.

"Neeva was built on the premise that search should focus on the consumer, and only the consumer, not advertisers," says Sridhar Ramaswamy, chief executive 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 in creating a viable 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 ads, Neeva aims to give its competitors a run for their money in other ways as well. For example, the browser extension that Neeva users use to search offers a built-in tracker blocker and allows for completely anonymous searches.

Those who want to can connect Neeva to their email accounts, calendars and cloud storage platforms to find content from those areas via the Neeva search slot as well. Similarly, news sources and retailers can be defined as prioritized sources. Their results would then be shown in priority.

In the process, Neeva is bringing back a feature that Google abandoned years ago, namely the private dashboard as the starting point for search. Neeva users can keep up with everything from stock picks to package delivery status on this so-called homepage.

Other clever features are in the pipeline. For instance, Neeva will be able to offer e-mail newsletters for subscription directly from a search results page. Operators are looking for partners in a wide variety of fields to securely integrate their offerings into Neeva.

Neeva works via browser extension

The linchpin of the new service is a browser-based extension that works with Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Edge and Safari across all platforms. There is a separate app for iOS.

It is unclear when the service will also be available in Europe, but it should not be expected too soon. At the moment, the service is working on filling its own search index to be less dependent on other providers. In doing so, it will certainly proceed according to language regions.

Although the Neeva crawler is already underway, the service currently still gets most of its results from Microsoft's Bing index. With a market share of around six percent, the search engine from Redmond is still 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 its potential for success. Here, Neeva is likely to have a hard time asserting itself against the free search giant Google with a fee of around $60 per year and a smaller search index. Of course, it will ultimately depend on the outcome.

If Neeva succeeds in offering far more useful results than the market leader, it could possibly find enough paying customers. But Neeva will certainly never replace Google.