Once upon a time, there were magical places full of computers. They were coin operated, and had access to something called the internet. These were called “internet cafes,” and existed for a time in the 90’s when people didn’t have access to the internet in their own homes. It’s hard to imagine paying just to quickly to look up something online, but you would (and it wasn’t all that quick).
That’s the closest analogy I have for Neeva. Neeva is a search engine built by ex-Google employees. Unlike Google and virtually every other search engine (yes, even DuckDuckGo), Neeva doesn’t make money with ads. And, unlike Google, they don’t collect your information to show you “more relevant” ads, but instead show you more relevant results.
With Neeva, you’re paying for a search engine, but, in a sense, you’re really paying for privacy.
How much would you pay to make your searches private, and focused on accurate results rather than ads?
Enter Neeva
Neeva claims to be the “world’s only ad-free, private search engine.” The results have no ads, and Neeva doesn’t collect your data to sell ads to advertisers. They do collect data from connected services, like calendars, for 90 days, but only to improve your own personal results. Data is encrypted during transmission and at rest on Neeva’s servers, and Neeva deletes it after 90 days. In the future, that will be something users can configure. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s still better than Google’s privacy-violating data collection.
Search engines make their money from advertising. Google became one of the most profitable companies in the world because they collect user information and sell highly targeted ads. So how does Neeva survive? By asking you to pay for this privacy. Neeva currently has a free trial, but, after that, privacy and an ad-free search experience will cost you. It’s really that simple. You pay for something, then you get to use it.
Weird, right? It doesn’t even require trading in your firstborn child or your past 12 months of online purchases.
Pay Up-Front
Right now, Neeva is free for three months. After that, they’ll start charging you an “introductory price” of $4.95. Neeva hasn’t stated what the full price will be for those who come to the platform after they’ve launched. If you’re thinking it sounds like a good offer, now may be the time to check out Neeva. If not, you can always go back to trading your private information in exchange for search results.
Search is broken, and, as a result, much of the web is broken. It’s why you hate searching for something and not seeing the answer right on the page. You have to dig through results. Then when you find one, you have to read through a 600 word introductory segment. Have you tried looking up a simple recipe lately? It’s a pain! That’s because those sites survive off of ads. It’s because pages have to be a certain length to improve their search engine optimization so Google will put their page at the top of the results and they’ll make more money from the Google ads embedded on their webpage. Ads haven’t just made webpages uglier, they’ve changed how content is created for the web. You’ll see that sort of ad-centric design everywhere once you know what to look for, and I do mean everywhere. Maybe it’s time we rethink the entire internet, starting with the most important utility of all: search.
You can sign up for Neeva now, without a credit card, and get it for free for the first 3 months. You can also complete “quests,” like installing the app, or creating spaces in the service, to unlock up to 4 free months of Neeva. After that, you’ll get the early bird pricing of $4.95 if you want to continue. There’s an iOS app and an Android app is on the way, along with browser extensions for major browsers.
Maybe it’s time we change how we think about the internet a little bit. After all, we’ve come a long way since internet cafes, but still haven’t made it past the barrage of ads.
Sources:
- Ivan Mehta, The Next Web
- David Pierce, Protocol