Neeva: utopia or revolution in the world of search engines?

Not so long ago, information appeared on the network about the launch of a new search engine called Neeva. The founders of this project, former Google top managers Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, decided to revise the concept of the entire modern search for information on the Internet and created a startup to develop a new search system.

Features of Neeva

As stated, the main difference of Neeva will be the complete absence of search ads and built-in user activity trackers. However, the search engine itself will be paid – about $5, with a free trial period of 3 months.

For a domestic user, spoiled by torrents and other charms of pirate life, such a shift in emphasis towards subscription fees may become a novelty. Most likely, in the territory of the CIS, the product will be in little demand and will not find proper popularity in wide circles.

Prerequisites for the appearance of Neeva

Google’s financial statistics for the last 10 years and a short excursion into the history of this search engine will allow us to understand the reasons for the project’s appearance. Let’s start with the second.

If you have been using Google for more than 10 years, you may have noticed significant metamorphoses in search results related to the amount of advertising and its display options.

For example, in 2007, advertising blocks looked like this:

All ad units had distinctive features and were clearly different from organic search results.

Advertisements have now “learned” to imitate regular snippets quite well, so even a confident user can sometimes accidentally click on an ad without noticing the relevant markup.

A number of additional blocks have also appeared, which sometimes push organic search results up to the second visual screen.

It should be noted that in addition to the visible impact of advertising, the search engine has become full of additional tools, for example, trackers that track the actions and interests of users for commercial purposes.

In general, Google has become more “loyal” to sites that use paid advertising. In some cases, the case reached high-profile court proceedings.

In this context, it is important to take into account the monopoly position of the company in a number of countries.

Of course, all this caused a serious increase in the company’s financial indicators:

*Official report of Alphabet for the first quarter of 2021 (the company that owns Google).

Of interest here, we should highlight advertising revenue, which grew by almost a quarter compared to the same period in 2020. In last year’s report, there was also a serious increase from $24 billion to $32 billion.

All these factors and patterns allow us to conclude that in the near future Google will only multiply the share of the advertising segment in favor of the commercial component.

On the basis of these metamorphoses, Neeva was born, which aims to occupy the niche of quality organic search and revise the concept of relevance towards useful content.

SEO and Neeva. Problems at the first stages of development

Advertising really has a negative impact on the quality of organic search results, that’s a fact. At the same time, one should not forget about its positive aspects, for example, significant help in the development of new sites. This is especially true when it comes to competitive niches. So how are the authors of Neeva going to promote new members of the issue? I addressed this question to them personally. The response was (translated):

“By opting out of advertising, we can prevent companies from paying to appear in our search results, which we hope will result in a greater depth and variety of relevant results for this query. In terms of competition, we have just launched an affiliate program to encourage smaller members who provide quality content and results. For more information on this, check out our recent blog post!”

Link to the relevant article on their blog: https://neeva.com/blog/supporting-humanities-curiosity-with-quality-content.

So far, it is difficult to judge such decisions, but, most likely, everything will come down to a large number of aggregators and marketplaces on the first page, because the concept of “quality” content is very stretched, especially in commercial niches and is not the prerogative of only new projects. In addition, it is highly unlikely that Neeva will abandon other ranking factors for exclusive content.

To summarize

It will be very interesting to follow the development of Neeva. But this interest will be greater as a social project (as it is, so far, and positioned by the authors), than a real competitor of Google. Although it is not at all excluded that a group of 60 people will eventually be able to overturn our idea of ​​searching for information on the World Wide Web.

Olha Tyshchenko

Editor

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