AI rival Neeva to take on ChatGPT

An ad-free search engine created by former Google and YouTube executives, which has an AI feature to rival ChatGPT, is being launched in Australia this week.

Search results delivered by soon-to-launch search engine Neeva.

A ChatGPT rival founded in the US by two former Google and YouTube executives is about to be launched in Australia and its founders are confident it won’t be banned in schools or universities.

Neeva, an independent search engine which stops tracking and removes ads with a subscription-based service, is set to be launched on Thursday.

It’s coupled with a new AI product that can answers in real time and shows users exactly where the answers came from.

Neeva AI draws upon Neeva’s search stack which has indexed billions of news pages to provide a single answer to queries while citing its sources – unlike rival ChatGPT.

While NeevaAI has fewer capabilities than ChatGPT – which is able to write essays, has been shown to pass medical exams and can construct rap music – co-founder Sridhar Ramaswamy expected his product with cited sources would quickly gain ground while Microsoft and Google struggle to deliver a product that keeps their advertisers happy.

“Intuitively, people like answers better than they like long sets of links. AI lets Neeva give you a sort of mix of answers and links,” he said.

“Our answers are only as trustworthy as the web search results that are there; that’s the power of AI.

“We use the power of search to make sure that we can up-rank trustworthy sites and down-rank unknown sites to answer common search queries.”

The idea for Neeva began four years ago. It was started by Mr Ramaswamy, a former senior vice-president of Google Ads, and Vivek Raghunathan, a former vice-president of YouTube monetisation.

Sridhar Ramaswamy.

Vivek Raghunathan.

The idea has drawn big interest from investors, who have put $US80m ($114m) into the business. Backers include Sequoia Capital, Greylock Ventures, iNovia Capital, and Neythri Futures Fund. The company has raised more than $US80m from its investors.

The launch of NeevaAI comes just weeks after Microsoft made headlines for investing $14.2bn into OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which it plans to launch in its search engine Bing.

Google has also announced its plan to launch Bard, a similar AI search feature which wiped $144.5bn off of the company’s market value last week as the chatbot shared delivered false information in a promotional tweet.

Mr Ramaswamy said his team had worked hard to ensure NeevaAI would not give incorrect answers like its rivals.

“It can basically distil information down to a level that you can quickly understand it and then you can decide if you want to deep dive into a particular area. We don’t create facts, and you can only be as trustworthy as the citation,” he said.

Search results within the Neeva search engine.

NeevaAI looks somewhat similar to how Wikipedia’s featured snippets appear in a Google search except they are front and centre, a deliberate move, according to Mr Ramaswamy.

“The first integration of ChatGPT into Bing is a little bit on the underwhelming side. The answers are actually shown on the right-hand side of a desktop page and not many people actually read the right hand side,” he said.

“I suspect that part of the reason for that is they’re worried about what these models can say or do.”

Commercial interests will cause some issues to both Google and Microsoft as they work out how to best use and display their AI search features while still allowing advertisers to feature prominently, Mr Ramaswamy said.

“In my mind, both Bing and Google are facing this conundrum, that they will not know what to do with commercial queries,” he said.

Neeva has about 2 million active users according to the company. The monetisation strategy is simpler than other search engines and appears to be targeting VPN users.

Virtual Private Networks, which some people use to change their location to access Facebook in countries like China, allow users to access the internet via a private connection which hides their IP (internet protocol) address.

It charges users $7.99 per month or $69.99 per year for access to its premium service which includes a VPN as well as password manager. A free model with ads is available.

A query being answered by NeevaAI.

It was launched officially in the US in 2021 and in Western Europe last October.

“Honestly, we were blown away by how much better we did in Western Europe and in the UK compared to the US,” Mr Ramaswamy said.

“These people care a lot more about digital rights, about privacy and they are a lot more concerned about how large of a monopoly that Google is.”

Asked if there was demand in Australia for an independent search engine, Mr Ramaswamy said he believed Australia’s response to the Facebook news ban showed there was appetite for better privacy measures.

“People don’t like the fact that there is such a dominant player on a fairly critical daily use function,” he said.

“My likely take is that we will be well received in Australia as well.”