Two questions:

1) Will users pay for the "premium" version of an otherwise free search engine? (If not, how is Neeva going to make money?)

2) Does Neeva do all of its own crawling and indexing (unlike, say, DuckDuckGo)? If so, I'm impressed.

The premium version allows users to personalize results. If that was all Neeva offered I doubt many would pay, there is a free version as you say.

I intend to pay when the ChatGPT-esque feature Neeva is building becomes available to members only. That feature can write, evaluate and fact-check content in real time for you, as you write it. Can't wait to see it live for everyone(likely member only feature).

The question you should be asking is "How do authors and content marketing experts make money when an AI assistant with real-time access to all information can do it better, in a fraction of the time?" Need to write a detailed email newsletter? What do you want to do with the other 23.8 hours of your day?

For non-webmasters it's about search experience and Neeva hits a homerun.

Here is a well-written early impression review of Neeva - [kevin-indig.com...]

One thing is clear already - you will enjoy the ad-free search experience. When the AI assistant goes live behind a paywall sites that charge for content-related services need to worry.

This is where Neeva gets it's search results, and they have a crawler called Neevabot - [help.neeva.com...]

The focus is on total search experience without bias. So far it's amazing.

There is more information about Neeva around here that might have been missed. A few older discussions:
The startup - June 20, 2020: [webmasterworld.com...]
and about public availability - Oct 15, 2021: [webmasterworld.com...]

Seen 'em for a while. Failed my first test quite some time back:

You can have robots.txt which is whitelisted for only select bots and if you ignore: get out!

They didn't, so blocked.

And this "free stuff" is only designed to prime the pump before all the "pay to play" and "work for me, not you" starts to happen. As for advertising, didn't g start out without any? Just sayin'!

TANSTAAFL!

Been bit too many times to get teary eyed over a "free search engine with no ads" as that is a fairy tale in the making that only lasts "so long...."

I've largely ignored Neva because the results haven't been particularly good.
It's not been bad at getting the top result, but if you researching it seems a bit hap-hazard.

Now Neeva is closing the consumer side of the search engine.

[neeva.com...]

Wow. I can't say they are making a bad move though.

The consumer side is too tough a nut to crack, and I was never sure it's business model would work.

Start with high hopes, pie in the sky, and reality comes to bite. The search engine industry is as competitive as any other.

The following message was cut out to new thread by engine. New thread at: alternative_search_engines/5095395.htm [webmasterworld.com]
9:51 am on Oct 16, 2023 (utc +1)