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Neeva — Ad-free, private search
Created by ex-Google execs, Neeva is the world’s first 100% ad-free and private subscription-based search engine that puts the user first. Neeva never shares or sells user data with anyone and is committed to showing high-quality results for every search.
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Hi @product_at_producthunt / Michael! Duck is a free search engine that promises to remember nothing about you: we call that an anonymous search engine. Well, that means Duck doesn't get better for you as you keep using it. Duck still has ads and the instant you click on an ad, advertisers and the rest of the internet are tracking you even though Duck is not. On Neeva, there are no ads and therefore no search-enabled tracking. You go directly to the site you want. Ultimately, anonymous search engines force a bad choice: privacy or an unpersonalized search experience that does not get better. Neeva is personalized, private and ads free which we think is superior. Brave appears to have the same model in being ad supported.
For the record, we love that search engines like Duck exist. They give us choice and prevent important functions like search from being the purview of one or two players.
Our thesis is that a subscription search engine is set up for long term success because of the dedication we bring to the product getting better. That's our only job, we have no ads and advertisers to deal with.
I'm excited to share this hunt with everyone. My friend, @sridhar_ramaswamy1 and team have been hard at work building a new search experience. Not only is it a great search product, it’s private and ad-free. I've been using it as my default search engine for a while now and am finding more to like all the time. Changing search engines is a big deal for most, but I think it is well-worth the benefits to explore Neeva and give it serious consideration. I'm happy to share this personal find with the community.
!!!!! COOL! I've heard about this private search around built by ex-google employees a week ago! Joined waitlist!
It's a pity that Neeva join waitlist email goes to the "promotions" folder, so I am afraid when you are ready to launch in my country, your notification may stay unnoted.
@cn__katie Thanks for your interest in Neeva. We hear you. We hope that doesn't happen when it's time. But just in case, please follow Neeva on Twitter or LinkedIn, we will announce country launches on our social channels when it's time. :-)
Thank you, @stevesi !
Hi, this is Sridhar and I am excited to introduce you to Neeva. The world’s first ad-free, private subscription search engine.
I don’t have to remind you how far off course mainstream search has gone. Today, one can barely tell where the ads end and your search begins. What started as a well-intentioned way to organize the world’s information has turned into a business focusing most of its resources on monetizing clicks to support advertisers rather than focusing on you.
We founded Neeva to change this by completely reimagining search. Search that is ads-free, private, and customizable.
This all starts with flipping the traditional business model from an ads-based to a subscription-based service that is 100 percent focused on delivering the best search experience for you. That’s it. There are no ads and no advertisers. Moreover, Neeva personalizes search so you can make it your own. You can connect Neeva to your email accounts, your calendars, and your cloud storage platforms — allowing you to find what’s most important to you at the click of a button. (We are adding more app connectors all the time!) And just as it’s more personal it’s also more private. Your data is never tracked and never sold.
We are thrilled to share Neeva with all of you and we promise to do everything we can to give you the best possible search experience.
@stevesi @sridhar_ramaswamy1 @vivek_raghunathan1 : This is awesome Sridhar and Vivek. More power to the Internet community 🔥, yup ad-free has been the motto but now its a reality :) Congrats on the launch here!
Anyone taking on “the” search giant has my respect. Search has become overly monetized at the expense of UX and it’s only going to get worse w/current model, where advertisers are the customers. Current search is actually forcing brands to advertise. It’s ridiculous that a brand has to pay for an ad to secure a top spot in a SERP that their brand should organically hold that spot for. Should be a public outcry over the exploitation. Given your team’s background, I have faith that there’s a fighting chance that no ads, no third-party tracking et al will be the norm. Wishing Neeva and team much success!
Very nice and interesting product. How are the results of searches curated? And how does the search through personal accounts work?
In any case, thank you for releasing something like this
Hi @rubenwolff ! We use a combination of static (domain/page level) and dynamic signals (what does this user like) to rank search results. Personal account search indexes your data (for your results *only*). At runtime, we blend the different corpuses together to produce a single result page.
Long-awaited product! Have been following your journey from while!
So it's even more sad to see it's not available outside of the US 😞 When do you plan to expand and why not just allow to have access to the same search results? I'm not living in the US rn but read the same sources & search in English only 😳
Hi @the_andriy_bond ! We haven't built out the one box integrations for things like local results, stocks, etc. Drop us a note at feedback@neeva.co if you want to give us a spin anyway.
Noticing the world’s privacy crisis, Neeva is just the product people need. I really loved the simple user-friendly interface. Finally a search engine with no annoying ads and virus threats. I wanted to know if the blocking of trackers works on the linked third party apps? This product really does have a lot of potential for growth.
Hey there. This is Vivek. I co-founded Neeva with @sridhar_ramaswamy1, and am super excited to bring Neeva to Product Hunt.
Search is one of the foundational inventions of our time. We use it every day to amplify our intelligence. Imagining a world without search is nearly impossible.
And while search made remarkable historical strides in getting information to you, it has gotten increasingly away from its original mission. Traditional search engines work by monetizing you, the user. You are the product being sold, and not the customer. And that means, when search engines have to choose between showing you that perfect review for a Wi-Fi router, or showing you a bunch of ads from the biggest retailers, they choose the latter. Which sorta makes sense. They put their customer (the advertiser) first, not you.
We founded Neeva to reimagine search for you, the end user. You are our only customer. We are in the business of building the world's best search experience for you. We only make money if you get enough value from Neeva to pay for it. Our incentives are perfectly aligned.
We start with the basics. We show you no ads. We kill third party tracking. We don't sell your data. On every query, we focus on delivering the best result for you. And as a search engine built for you, we give you agency to make your search experience better. You control which news websites you trust and which new websites you don't. You can choose to connect Neeva to your SaaS services, whether it's email, calendar, cloud storage (and many more in the works). When you do that, you have one place to search across all your information. No more guessing for whether you should go to Stack Overflow or Slack for the solution to your problem.
I am very excited to have all of you try Neeva. Building a search engine that reimagines search for you, the end user, is a high bar, and we take that responsibility very seriously. Our product is still early, and feedback from all of you is critical to us getting better. Happy searching!
Congratulations @sridhar_ramaswamy1 @vivek_raghunathan1 and the Neeva team! Excited to see incentive aligned search become the new normal!
You are positioning yourselves as the anti-Google. However, aren't you the Google executives directly responsible for the excessive advertising and tracking on Google Search and YouTube?
It seems to me that you are doing the same thing here that you did with YouTube, asking people to pay to get rid of the advertising that you ruined Google search with in the first place.
Also, do you mine users' searches or store them in any way? Private has a very specific meaning. If something is private, only I have access to my information and it should not be used for any other purpose. If my searches are private, that means they should be private only to myself.
I posted a comment below, and asked the same questions when you launched on Hacker News a few weeks ago (with no answer). However, I think it is worth asking directly. It seems to me you are mining way more data than Google ever has, and this product looks like a Google-lite where users are paying to have the ads removed.
@dan_e_boy please see @sridhar_ramaswamy1's response to your other comment.
It is also a fallacy that only products that know nothing about you can be private. Neeva uses your searches to provide useful features like future search suggestions. We do not ever share this information with anybody else. And you can turn this feature off completely with a flick of a button. We are private, but not anonymous: just like we expect a doctor’s visit to be private but not anonymous.
@sridhar_ramaswamy1 @vivek_raghunathan1 Hello. I am giving it a test. Is there a way to remove all the news completely? I want as little distraction as possible. Thank you and have an amazing day! 😊
@deysonortiz Thanks for the feedback. Your feature request is incidentally one of our top user asks from the last few weeks, and we are in the process of building it. Please keep the feedback coming, either here or via the product. Excited at the chance to earn your loyalty.
Success to you! Everyone is already tired of contextual advertising and personalised search results! You are doing a noble cause.
Hey Product Hunt! I've been beta testing Neeva since April. @sridhar_ramaswamy1 and the entire team have done a great job on a search engine that I imagine will only get better with time.
That said, I switched back to using Google (with AdBlock) about a week ago. I got relevant results most of the time with Neeva, particularly in the areas of news and product searches. I had more trouble finding the correct answer to my software development questions.
Unfortunately, Google's spillover became relevant when I started searching for local restaurant reviews as well. My preferred platform for finding good eats is Google Maps -- I'm a big contributor there! With Neeva (understandably) pushing Yelp over Google Maps, I found myself opening a new tab and entering a specific location in Maps to look at reviews.
This is all to say that Neeva has done an incredible job for most cases, but wasn't enough to make me stick around. I'd encourage everyone to try Neeva out and decide for yourself what you prefer!
Thanks for the feedback @ggarnhart ! Our team is hard at work making local & programming searches better. In addition, we try to make it easy to get to the same place on Google or Apple maps with direct links. Plus, you can always use our query shortcuts feature to append “!gmaps” and redirect your search to Google Maps. For example, “best restaurants near me !gmaps” will redirect you.
If you have any other thoughts or feedback on local — it’s great you’re a Google Maps contributor! — please reach out to feedback@neeva.co and we can help find a time for us to chat. Thanks again!
Hey Hunters! 👋
I'm Edmund, an early engineer here at Neeva. I've been lurking Product Hunt for years, discovering great products, and absorbing a ton of valuable insight from the product-interested community. So it's quite an honor to finally have a chance to build something and present it here as a maker today. 🙌
With the launch of our ad-free search engine, we're signaling the beginning of our journey to change the way we interact with the internet. Up to this point, ads-driven businesses have dominated a lot of the web we use with fee-free services, but at the cost of our data, privacy, and anonymity. Launching a search engine that does much more to respect your privacy without sacrificing the convenience that personalization brings is our first small (but ambitious) step towards creating and influencing a more private and less exploitative internet.
Even before joining Neeva, I've been interested in privacy-focused and user-centric products, and some of my favorite products today include 📝 Standard Notes , 💬 Signal , and 📧 ProtonMail . So, it's exciting that other like-minded individuals can begin to consider Neeva in their privacy stack alongside these other stand-out products.
So take us for a spin, and please don't hesitate to let us know what you think in a comment here or as feedback through Neeva. We greatly appreciate the support! 🙏
— Edmund 🦜
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Neeva 😄 but Google's failure to stick to its mission has bothered me enough to leave a comment.
A while back I wondered if anyone had taken them on—beyond the usual suspects and the likes of DuckDuckGo and Ecosia (with their interesting ad revenue going towards planting trees model!) In that search, I ended up coming across Cuil* (obviously their search 👀 for product-market-fit didn't go as planned https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/... — some interesting internet trivia for you there 😄
As I then reflected on Google's unchanged mission—"to organise the world's information"—and dominance in search, I thought to myself this isn't organised, it's arranged yes, but organised? Well not so much. I have high expectations when I think about how search would look if Google was even close to its mission. The other week I was thinking, heck I'd pay (money not attention;)) for a better search engine and thought to myself why isn't there one. Mind you I didn't go looking, call it inertia and perhaps it was more of a fleeting thought. But here we are. So I guess this is the acid test (for me and many others). Will I end up paying for search?
This brings me to a question, privacy aside (and I appreciate that part is core to Neeva's proposition), but how will you handle indexing or rather SEO?
Beyond ads, I find heavily optimised SEO results to be a bigger issue. Many organic results are ads in a different guise. Sometimes that's fine when the quality of the content is on point, but increasing I don't believe I'm getting results organised by quality. By which I mean scored on depth and richness, and perhaps personalised (or better yet personal taste—there's a difference in my book). But the status quo shouldn't be all that surprising as the incentives aren't aligned.
I'm not expecting unbiased results but, by way of example, a search for best anything will be dominated by whoever is selling that service or product rather than whoever wrote the best takes (without gaming SEO in mind).
As a workaround of sorts, I end up using advanced Google search in an attempt to unearth better results in none obvious ways or I leverage other platforms or communities. But it's a bit of a faff. So paid certainly sounds intriguing.
Now, I'm pretty sure the above question is already answered. I need to spend a bit of time reading through the responses properly. I'm asking more from the point of view of airing my thoughts as a would-be customer. Semi rhetorical if you like 😆 but I won't complain if someone answers it.
All in, exciting to see someone making what others might believe is an unthinkable move—paid search—but not as we know it. I can see the one-liner now.
"Paid search—but not as you know it." :)
* I'm sure a lot of 100s of startups have tackled this over the years, but Cuil caught my eye given the Irish connection and story.
PS. @vivek_raghunathan1 and @sridhar_ramaswamy1 and team it's great to see the manner of this launch. Plenty of the team on hand to answer questions, respond to feedback and not shying away from some of the tough questions being asked—which to be fair are all great challenges in themselves and the right questions people should be asking.
Hi Keith @lynnastyie , apologies for the slow reply. (I got a minor surgery this morning.) First, thank you so much for your thoughtful feedback. It is the passion of people like you that gives us inspiration to take on a hard problem.
At some level, commercial engines pretend that there is a single user with universal preferences. The ads model forces part of this: every auctioneer worries about "thin" auctions: the more personalization one introduces the fewer participants there are and the lower the auction pressure and money made. (I can write a book about this topic.)
We view search and Neeva differently. We view our customer as a distinct individual with their own preferences. Let's face it: I pay for some news sources and not others. I buy from some retailers but not others. We want Neeva to know this and give you agency. This will be a natural counterbalance to excessive SEO'ing. We have already introduced things like preferred providers for news. Tech sources and shopping are on their way next. None of us expect to have the same playlists as even our close friends or spouse. Why should your search be the same? We all want high quality, authoritative results: but ones that reflect our tastes and preferences.
Thanks again!
I've been using Neeva as my default search engine for the past few months, and have been loving it. Search results are exceptional, and it's refreshing to get fewer corporate results. I love the privacy first approach along with the integration with Gmail & the news customization feature. Definitely a great tool and looking forward to seeing it evolve.
Thank you, @noah_lenz ! We are just getting started creating a search experience that works for you! Lots more ability to customize and personalize coming soon!
Its a great product. The biggest hurdle is of course to see how many of us pay for Search. All the best on on this quest. Tough, but worthy one to crack. 🖖
Been using for a few weeks now and it is far and away the best search tool. The secret weapon is the app integrations, which I hope they continue to add to over time.
Neeva comes across as a very personal and trust-worthy search engine. The private search feature is really unique. Custom news feeds are like cherry on the top. Does it allow us to use SEO and other similar features as well?
I am looking forward to an ad-free searching experience.
Loving the concept, I'm just curious about this is different/better than duckduckgo? Also, will you be taking part in censoring of any search results, such as info about view on vaccinations, etc? I'm not saying where I land on this, I just really like to have access to all sides of all stories so I can make my own informed decisions about what I believe, rather than having only one side funnelled to me. Thanks so much
Hi Nathan @natemaingard ! I am pasting a reply from an earlier question that you likely missed:
Duck is a free search engine that promises to remember nothing about you: we call that an anonymous search engine. Well, that means Duck doesn't get better for you as you keep using it. Duck still has ads and the instant you click on an ad, advertisers and the rest of the internet are tracking you even though Duck is not. On Neeva, there are no ads and therefore no search-enabled tracking. You go directly to the site you want. Ultimately, anonymous search engines force a bad choice: privacy or an unpersonalized search experience that does not get better. Neeva is personalized, private and ads free which we think is superior. Brave appears to have the same model in being ad supported.
For the record, we love that search engines like Duck exist. They give us choice and prevent important functions like search from being the purview of one or two players.
Our thesis is that a subscription search engine is set up for long term success because of the dedication we bring to the product getting better. That's our only job, we have no ads and advertisers to deal with.
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Our goal is get you the information that is out there. We will offer the facilities to learn more about the sites you are getting your information so that you can decide for yourself. In that sense, our goal is to not censor things.
Great idea! Nowadays, media space is really overloaded with different ads. Good luck to you and to the moon!
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