As Omar Little liked to say on The Wire, “If you come after the King, you best not miss.”
And my fellow Localogy analyst Mike Boland and I have often discussed a variation on this theme on the This Week in Local podcast. We’ve noted the long succession of companies and products that have either been touted or touted themselves as Google Killers. The jury may still be out on whether AI will miss The King (it best not). Until now, however, the succession of Google killers is mostly a graveyard.
The latest Google Killer coffin appears to belong to Neeva. This is the subscription-based and ad-free search engine launched in 2020 by former Google exec Sridhar Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy once ran Google’s ads business.
VC heavyweights like Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners funded Neeva. Its backers also included individual tech luminaries like LinkedIn founder Reed Hoffman and Scott Galloway (aka Prof G). Today, the Neeva website greets you with a message that the site will shut down on June 2. How things change.
Last week, we learned that Neeva was shuttering its search engine, but not the entire business. At least not yet. Ramaswamy (and co-founder Vivek Raghunathan, ex of YouTube) said as much in a company blog post. The problem, it seems, was that no one was picking up what Neeva was putting down. Neeva did say it will give its Premium subscribers, such as they are, pro-rated refunds.
We’ve discovered that it is one thing to build a search engine and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better choice. From the unnecessary friction required to change default search settings, to the challenges in helping people understand the difference between a search engine and a browser, acquiring users has been really hard. Contrary to popular belief, convincing users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place.
Pivoting to AI
Neeva was quick to marry AI and search. Perhaps they thought it would give them an edge. It didn’t.
“We are proud of being the first search engine to provide cited, real-time AI answers to a majority of queries early this year,” the execs wrote in their post announcing the shutdown.
Neeva says it will carry on as a business. Just as a completely different business. The company apparently will carry on as an enterprise AI business. As noted, Neeva was quick to see the intersection of AI and search. It just didn’t help save them. Or make them into a true Google Killer.
More from the blog post last week.
Over the past year, we’ve seen the clear, pressing need to use LLMs [large language models] effectively, inexpensively, safely, and responsibly. Many of the techniques we have pioneered with small models, size reduction, latency reduction, and inexpensive deployment are the elements that enterprises really want, and need, today. We are actively exploring how we can apply our search and LLM expertise in these settings, and we will provide updates on the future of our work and our team in the next few weeks.
Ok, that doesn’t say much. What it does seem to say is, “We’ve learned a lot about AI and think there’s a business there.”
Neeva has a smart team and it may end up crushing whatever it tries to do with AI. This assumes Neeva can keep a strong team together to pursue whatever opportunity it ends up pursuing. We will watch and see what, if anything, rises from the ashes down the road.
