Challenger search engine Neeva wants to replace the familiar “10 blue links” in search results with something more fitting for the modern AI age.
Back in December, Neeva co-founder and CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, who previously spearheaded Google’s advertising tech business, teased new “cutting edge AI” and large language models (LLMs), positioning itself against the ChatGPT hype train.
“ChatGPT cannot give you real-time data or fact verification,” Ramaswamy wrote at the time. “In our upcoming upgrades, Neeva can.”
Fast-forward to January and Neeva formally launched NeevaAI to the U.S. market, pitched as an “authentic, real-time AI search.” While it was technically possible for users around the globe to access NeevaAI before now, it required a little jiggery-pokery in the account settings, involving changing language and location preferences. Today, however, NeevaAI is officially rolling out internationally to logged-in users, including Canada, the U.K., Germany, France, and Spain. Additionally, the Neeva search engine itself (not NeevaAI) will be rolling out to Australia and New Zealand.
The timing of today’s announcement is particularly notable, coming a week after Microsoft reignited the search engine wars with the introduction of ChatGPT to its Bing search engine and, with it, the promise of a completely reimagined search experience.
What is the ChatGPT?
Most years can pretty much be defined by at least one over-arching tech trend. In 2022, web3 was one of the big buzzwords in town, with the metaverse and tangential immersive technologies also jostling for mindshare. While there is nothing to indicate that such trends will wither any time soon, it’s clear from the first six weeks of the new year that generative AI will be the big talking point of 2023.
Generative AI, essentially, describes the process of using algorithms to create (“generate”) new content. The poster child of this movement is ChatGPT, a chatbot-style technology trained on large language models (LLMs) capable of producing scarily good (but far from flawless) work such as essays, articles, poems, lyrics, and even computer programs. The handiwork of OpenAI, a Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence (AI) research body, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm since its prototype was first introduced back in November, with some arguing that its launch signals AI’s arrival into the mainstream.
With OpenAI already commercializing the service through a premium subscription, the mighty Google last week scrambled into action to unveil a new “experimental conversational AI service” called Bard, showcasing how AI might transform search engines by powering synthesized responses collated from multiple sources to provide more nuanced answers to online queries. And that is what Microsoft actually launched two days later — an all-new incarnation of Bing powered by a more advanced version of ChatGPT, customized for real-time search.
Rather than serving the usual laddered list of links, the new AI-infused search engine takes a request, scans for answers, and generates a response replete with citations to the original sources.
And this, effectively, is what Neeva is now bringing to international markets, a month on from its U.S. launch.
The story so far
By way of a brief recap, Mountain View, California-based Neeva first launched a subscription-only search engine in its domestic U.S. market in June 2021 and later went on to add a free “basic” tier to the mix with certain restrictions in place. The company brought the search engine to Europe back in October and has since rolled it out to additional markets around the world.
Neeva’s core selling point is that it doesn’t monetize through advertising, and it prevents third-party trackers from using personal data to display personalized ads — Neeva wants to make money through good old-fashioned paid subscriptions.
An ad-free search environment means that users don’t have to scroll through myriad sponsored results to get to the organic links they want. However, Neeva’s basic look and feel are much the same as search engines have been since before even Google arrived on the scene — row after row of links to individual sources, with a few aesthetic deviations thrown into the mix.
But with NeevaAI, the startup is looking to do its part in reinventing its search.
TechCrunch has been dabbling with NeevaAI over the past few weeks, and from our tests, it performed pretty impressively, comfortably handling questions such as “Why were the Beatles so big?” or “What is the world 5k [running] record?,” with Neeva generating a response from multiple cited sources in real-time.
These citations are key to avoiding the “black box” controversies that engulf many AI technologies. The idea here is that showing people where it’s sourcing its information from, not only promotes transparency but also gives those who have published content to the web the credit they deserve and increases their chances of follow-on referral traffic.