Advert-free search engine Niva introduced on Saturday that it’s shutting down its shopper search operations and shifting in direction of synthetic intelligence. The corporate, based by former Google executives Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, introduced its plans to close down its search engine. Niva was as soon as touted as a critical competitor to Google Search, providing an ad-free and visible search expertise, however confronted challenges in attracting customers to its platform, therefore the choice.
In a weblog submit, Niva’s co-founders introduced the shutdown. “There isn’t any longer a strategy to construct a sustainable enterprise in shopper search. Consequently, over the subsequent few weeks, we can be shutting down neeva.com and our shopper search product, and shifting to a brand new space of focus,” Ramaswamy and Raghunathan wrote.
Historical past of Niwa
Niva was launched in 2019 with Google’s Head of Advert Enterprise on the helm. Whereas it promised customers a extra visually interesting search expertise with fewer adverts, Ramaswamy believed that the numerous variety of adverts on search engines like google and yahoo was affecting the standard of outcomes. Initially, it supplied solely a subscription service and after about 6 months a free tier was added.
The corporate claimed to have constructed the search stack from the bottom up with a group of simply 50 folks. Within the months that adopted, Niva amassed greater than 600,000 customers whereas increasing operations globally, beginning in Europe.
By 2022, Niva had built-in LLM into its search stack to maintain up with the AI revolution, turning into the primary search engine to supply quotation and real-time AI solutions.
However the plans appear to have in the end failed because the founders revealed, “Opposite to well-liked perception, convincing customers to pay for a greater expertise was truly a easier drawback than getting them to attempt a brand new search engine within the first place.”
Not solely improved search, however the firm was additionally within the strategy of rolling out its standalone generative AI search utility known as Gist. Whereas it was already launched on Android, its iOS launch was scheduled for March however was delayed indefinitely.
Niva will stop operations from June 2 and customers who’ve paid for the subscription will get a refund for the unused portion of their subscription.
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