Neeva aims to rethink the relationship with how we search for thinks. Not being reliant on adverting revenues Neeva can not only search the internet but can also be used to search your own private data without worrying about who’s looking.
Long-form Interview with the founder from January 2021 on the brilliant Danny in the Balley podcast from The Times.
It’s £5 a month for premium, they have a free version. I’ll start with the free one and see how I get on. Google is terrible at finding what you actually want.
Neeva rely on Bing under the hood. Unsure if that’s worth paying a fiver monthly for. Neeva also collect a ton of data. The cookie consent box and their mobile app banner take up way too much space.
If memory serves correct, then Brave Search is the only new entrant that actually indexes themselves. Brave let’s you proxy Google search through it as well.
Talking of which, Start Page which relies on Google Search is also worth a look. No cookies, or cookie banners.
Ecosia which is a B-Corp is also worth a look. They plant trees when you search. Ecosia uses Bing under the hood.
I like how they took the common Google hack of suffixing a query with ‘reddit’ for better results and made a button for it.
I think this (trustless web) is a big issue, but its more of a web issue than a Google search issue in my mind.
I tried some searches and it seems to go too far in removing the corporate promoted links. Like if I search a product name like iphone 14’ I don’t get any links to Apple or 3rd party reviews instead I mostly just get rumours from before it launched which are basically irrelevant now. Maybe this is a timing thing because reviews are only just dropping.
I can’t see myself using this because it doesn’t actually address the main privacy concern I have with Google (and most of tech) - that this data is still available to the state.
