Search engine Neeva announced today that it launched officially in the three European countries Germany, France and the United Kingdom.
Neeva is one of several search startups that is taking on the heavyweights Google Search and Bing. Founded by two former Google employees, it is an attempt to move away from the current advertisement-influenced search model towards one that is more user-friendly and useful.
Not only is Neeva promising an ad-free search environment, it is also guaranteeing that users are not tracked and that search results are not biased. Other features that set it apart from traditional search engines are options to customize the search experience, by prioritizing or downgrading certain sites or sources, or link to accounts on sites such as Dropbox, Figma or Slack, to include personal files in search results.
Neeva, like its rival Kagi, is available for free. Both finance search through premium accounts, which add functionality to the search experience.
The main idea behind both services is to finance operations solely through paying users. Currently, Neeva Premium is offered only in the United States, but the company announced plans to launch the premium option in the future in Europe as well.
Premium users gain access to new search engine features first, and get to use a VPN and password manager next to that.
Users from Germany, France and the United Kingdom get local search results for certain search topics, including stocks, weather, restaurants and more. French and German language versions of the interface are available as well.
Neeva uses its own index and Bing to deliver search results to users. The service supports image, video, news and maps searches, and search suggestions.
The search engine stores a “limited amount of information” about its users to “make the product better” for the individual user, according to the service’s FAQ. The information is deleted after 90 days by default.
Closing Words
It remains to be seen how ad-free search engines like Neeva or Kagi fare in the coming months and years. There is certainly a market for unbiased and ad-free search results, but it is not clear how many Internet users are willing to pay for that privilege. Both services need paying customers in the future to finance operations.
For now, Neeva is set on expansion and less focused on revenue generation.
Now You: would you pay for unbiased ad-free search results?
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