Neeva was neeva going to work

Excuse the pun in the title! This week Neeva announced that it was shutting down its subscription based, ad-free, privacy focused search engine. Although this news was greeted by quite some surprise in the search world, it wasn’t really a surprise at all. How many people have actually used Neeva? No one I know has ever used it, let alone heard of it.

You only have to look at the struggle that Bing has had, with all of the mighty resources of Microsoft behind it, trying to compete with Google and failing. Bing has a miniscule share of the search market, probably less than 5%.

So, how was a search engine, that you had to pay to use, ever going to compete against the free established options? Neeva stated that the problem wasn’t so much getting users to pay, it was just the underestimated difficulty in getting people to change from what they are so familiar with. Once users are used to having something for free, it’s practically impossible to make them pay for it. Even Twitter now, with its pointless paid options, has only got a tiny percentage of users to part with their money, and most of those are either Musk fanatics or those that desperately want a little blue tick…which means nothing now.

Search has evolved to the extent that it is highly complex and requiring vast amounts of money. It’s also part of our lives. It’s highly likely that people will still “google it” for a long time to come. The competition just isn’t there and we’re so ingrained in Google’s eco system.

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