Two years ago Slashdot covered “the ad-free, privacy-first search engine from ex-Googlers” — with a $4.95 monthly subscription fee.
Today long-time Slashdot reader imcdona brings the news that “Neeva” is now shutting down. From Neeva’s announcement:
We started Neeva with the mission to take search back to its users. Having worked on search and search ads for over a decade, we sincerely believed that there was space for a model of search that put user and not advertiser interests first — a private, ads-free experience.
Building search engines is hard. It is even harder to do with a tiny team of 50 people who are up against entrenched organizations with endless resources. We overcame these obstacles and built a search stack from the ground up, running a crawl that fetched petabytes of information from the web and used that to power an independent search stack.
In early 2022, the upcoming impact