Neeva Browser & AI Search 17+

De-Google your world with a real search engine that harkens back to the early days of Alta Vista in the early nineties before YOU became the “product”. I paid for the subscription very willingly; to be able to find a PDF of a technical manual without having to scroll through pages and pages of paid search results is priceless.

From what I understand, this search engine company was created by former google software engineers. The search engine definitely has access to indexing thats world class. I have never failed to find something on another search engine that could not be found here. But have found results on Neeva that I couldn’t find elsewhere.

Please do yourself a favor and rid yourself of ensh*ttified search engines (one specifically) and try this on out.

As I said in a support message, it doesn’t handle location-based queries very smoothly. I always test a browser based on its ability to provide movie showtimes near me. Add to that, it’s not quite able to capture my current location with precision, either though cellular or home ISP. For example, if I query “food near me”, it starts spitting out results that are either one mile off, or four miles off, depending on the respective aforementioned connection types.

That said, these are features that Google only introduced recently, in relative terms. On the basic queries, like product comparison, or general inquiry, this absolutely blows Google out of the water.

To those skeptical about paying for Neeva while Google’s “free”, remember that nothing is free. Concerns about basic privacy are old hat imo. Though Neeva addresses these concerns, and basically presents them as the primary value-prop, a la Duck-Duck-Go, it is also helping the market, and by extension society, take a step away from the algorithmic economy. It won’t be decades until we know the true effects of algorithms and machine learning on our collective minds, but I am confident they are, on balance, bad. Removing the perverse incentives of advertising in search may auger a positive shift for society/markets in the long run.

The search is pretty good. Aside from privacy, I really wanted just results, not tailored results to what some AI thinks I’m looking for, and for this it’s pretty great.

That being said, there are many cases where the search results for specific or uncommon info quickly devolve into irrelevance. I’m sure the search will get better over time though.

What caused me to write the review was I noticed today that they are now doing some equivalent of AMP - pre loaded pages that live on Neeva when they actually are another site. I really don’t like that. I want to go to the real website, and I definitely don’t want links I share to other people to pass through neeva. It’s part of what I most dislike about Chrome. It was refreshing when I discovered DuckDuckGo doesn’t do that, and I had assumed Neeva didn’t either so I’m a little disappointed.