Neeva announced last weekend that it is pivoting away from “consumer search”.
Neeva, on Twitter:
While consumer search is ending, the search and LLM journey continues in the enterprise space.
Sridhar Ramaswamy (co-founder), on Twitter:
We are going to be shutting down the consumer product and focusing on enterprise use cases of LLMs and search.
Sridhar Ramaswamy & Vivek Raghunathan (co-founders), on Neeva’s Blog:
… there is no longer a path towards creating a sustainable business in consumer search. As a result, over the next few weeks, we will be shutting down neeva.com and our consumer search product, and shifting to a new area of focus.
In an early response I wrote, on Twitter:
“Consumer search” is an interesting framing. I often used the phrase “general-purpose web search”. Enterprise search is often framed as intranet search (and distinct from site search or enterprise-serving web search, right?). Might they continue to crawl widely?
Have they long used this phrase? It is so much more consumption-oriented than their branding. Perhaps they are positioning this in comparison to “enterprise search”, but the naming still strikes me. It is often unmarked, just “search” or “search engine”, though sometimes “web” or “internet” is pre-pended. There are other names:
Brin, S., & Page, L. (1998). The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. Computer Networks, 30, 107–117. http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html [brin1998anatomy]
Diaz, A. (2008). Through the google goggles: Sociopolitical bias in search engine design. In Web search: Multidisciplinary perspectives (pp. 11–34). Springer. [diaz2008through]
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression how search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press. https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/algorithms-of-oppression/ [noble2018algorithms]
Van Couvering, E. (2008). The history of the internet search engine: Navigational media and the traffic commodity. In A. Spink & M. Zimmer (Eds.), Web search: Multidisciplinary perspectives (pp. 177–206). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75829-7_11 [vancouvering2008history]