With Google increasingly under fire for its privacy practices, more and more startups are trying to offer alternatives to Google – and Neeva is the latest.
Neeva is a new search engine with two bold features: it’s privacy-oriented and it’s ad-free.
Of course, there’s no such thing as a free meal, so that means a subscription.
The new Neeva search engine won’t have any ads but, to sustain itself, it will require users a monthly $4.95 subscription fee.
That in itself is a low sum, comparable with some streaming services, but search engines have historically been free of charge, so it’s curious if Neeva will get a user base that’s willing to pay.
Neeva won’t only block banners and such but also ads in the search results. If you look at Google, which offers around 6 ads on the first page of search results, out of a total of 10 or so positions, Neeva does seem tempting.
It also comes with a browser extension that blocks all trackers for you, from Facebook to marketing services like Outbrain or Doubleclick. It’s a similar extension to uBlock Origin but it’s nice to have it included in the package.
As for the browser itself, it comes with all the integrations you expect: Google, Office 365, GitHub, Dropbox and Slack.
It also lets you customize your search results by picking trusted sites.
To take another swipe at Google, which has been accused of showing too much information in the search results and thereby cutting traffic to those webpages it crawled for that information, Neeva will also share the profits with content creators.
“Moreover, we support the content ecosystem. Rather than being a toll collector for the web’s content, we are strongly pro-publisher and are committed to creating revenue opportunities for content creators. We will share at least 20% of our topline revenue with content creator partners when their content is used to directly answer a Neeva user’s query,” they say.
You can read more about this new search engine here and get a free 3-month Neeva trial.
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