Search engine Neeva has today launched in Europe to rival Google, by giving web users honest search results, no tracking, and with absolutely no advertisements or affiliate links.
Neeva puts users first and gives consumers control to customise their web search experiences. By eschewing ads and advertisers, Neeva eliminates corporate bias that has plagued the traditional search experience. Instead, Neeva's sole goal is to create a search engine that delivers the best results as quickly as possible. Neeva delivers honest results and empowers users to select their information sources such as news outlets, shopping, software engineering sites, travel and others based on personal preference and relevance, rather than what advertisers suggest, all while respecting users’ privacy by blocking third party tracking and never profiting off of user data.
Neeva’s European expansion follows a successful 2021 $40mm Series B funding round. Founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at YouTube), Neeva is reinventing web search for good, challenging Google’s web-search dominance.
Commenting on Neeva’s launch, CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy said: “Neeva is a user-first platform focused on private, transparent searches versus a search engine serving advertisers."
Commenting on Neeva’s launch, CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy said: “Neeva is a user-first platform focused on private, transparent searches versus a search engine serving advertisers. The internet should be your private corner of the web instead of a barrage of ads, SEO spam and irrelevant information. We’re reinventing search by giving users control over sources; providing accurate and transparent results as well as private and customised experiences without the influence of corporate bias, tracked around the web.”
Neeva offers a freemium model and will first launch its private, ad-free free basic service in Europe, later introducing its premium subscription model with additional features such as a VPN and password manager. Neeva operates its own independent search stack, returning lightning fast results with high levels of accuracy, drawing from an index of billions of web pages. In addition, Neeva enables users to connect personal applications like email, Dropbox, Slack, Figma and others making it easy to search across the most important personal documents while maintaining strict privacy controls.
“Google has dominated the search engine market, maintaining over 90 percent market share. Neeva will challenge this supremacy by creating a better search and browse experience that delights users,” says Mr Ramaswamy. He added: “Users should be in control of their search and web experience rather than accepting one company deciding the information they see. The ad-supported internet, has created vastly misaligned incentives that have made Big Technology monopolies and advertisers richer while exploiting the privacy and personal data of users. It’s time for a new approach to search that puts people first.”
To date, search alternatives to Big Tech have mostly offered stronger privacy but at the expense of diminished search quality. Neeva is unique in building its own independent search stack (crawling, indexing and serving at scale) and without ads, freeing it to design user-first features with the sole focus of providing the best results in the most efficient way possible all with the strong privacy one should expect and demand from today’s internet experience.
Neeva is growing fast, gaining more than 600,000 monthly users since launching in the USA in 2021. Investors include Sequoia Capital, Greylock Ventures, Inovia Capital, and Neythri Futures Fund. The company has raised over $80m from its investors.
About Neeva
Neeva is the world’s first user-first private search engine. Neeva takes search back to its roots by focusing entirely on the user, delivering high quality results without any ads, giving users control over their sources, and protecting user privacy by blocking trackers. Neeva’s independent search stack offers rich visual experiences, integrates community forum content, and search over personal applications. Learn more and start searching today at neeva.com.