我们创立 Neeva 的使命是将搜索服务还给用户。我们在搜索和搜索广告领域工作了十多年，我们真诚地相信，将用户利益而非广告商利益放在首位的搜索模型存在空间——一种私人的、无广告的体验。
建立搜索引擎很难。对于一个 50 人的小团队来说，要与拥有无尽资源的根深蒂固的组织抗衡就更难了。我们克服了这些障碍并从头开始构建了一个搜索堆栈，运行一个从网络中获取 PB 级信息的爬网，并将其用于为独立的搜索堆栈提供支持。
2022 年初，生成式人工智能和法学硕士即将产生的影响对我们来说变得清晰起来。我们开始了一项雄心勃勃的努力，将 LLM 无缝地融入我们的搜索堆栈。我们围绕创建答案引擎的愿景召集了 Neeva 团队。今年年初，我们成为第一个为大多数查询提供引用的实时 AI 答案的搜索引擎，我们为此感到自豪。
但在整个旅程中，我们发现构建搜索引擎是一回事，而说服普通用户需要切换到更好的选择则是完全不同的事情。从更改默认搜索设置所需的不必要摩擦，到帮助人们理解搜索引擎和浏览器之间差异的挑战，获取用户真的很难。与流行的看法相反，与让用户首先尝试新的搜索引擎相比，说服用户为更好的体验付费实际上是一个更简单的问题。
这些逆风，加上不同的经济环境，已经清楚地表明，在消费者搜索领域创建可持续发展的业务已无路可走。因此，在接下来的几周内，我们将关闭 neeva.com 和我们的消费者搜索产品，并转移到一个新的重点领域。
如果您付费订阅了 Neeva Premium，您将收到订阅中未使用部分的退款。我们的常见问题解答中为您提供了更多信息。作为关闭的一部分，我们将删除所有用户数据。Apple iOS 用户请尽快前往https://reportaproblem.apple.com/申请退款。
Neeva 拥有一个热情的客户和用户社区，他们在过去几年中一直支持我们。他们尝试了我们功能的早期预览，给了我们周到的反馈，给了我们每个年轻团队都需要的爱和鼓励。我们真的很感谢我们的社区，我们真的很抱歉我们无法继续提供您想要和应得的搜索引擎。
Neeva 的下一步是什么
在过去的一年里，我们清楚地看到了有效、廉价、安全和负责任地使用 LLM 的迫切需求。我们在小型模型、缩小尺寸、减少延迟和廉价部署方面开创的许多技术是当今企业真正想要和需要的元素。我们正在积极探索如何在这些环境中应用我们的搜索和 LLM 专业知识，我们将在接下来的几周内提供有关我们工作和团队未来的最新信息。
我们要感谢 Neeva 团队为构建 Neeva 所付出的时间、努力和奉献。很荣幸和大家一起接受这个挑战，我们不能选择更好的朋友和同事来踏上这段旅程。
原文：
We started Neeva with the mission to take search back to its users. Having worked on search and search ads for over a decade, we sincerely believed that there was space for a model of search that put user and not advertiser interests first—a private, ads-free experience.
Building search engines is hard. It is even harder to do with a tiny team of 50 people who are up against entrenched organizations with endless resources. We overcame these obstacles and built a search stack from the ground up, running a crawl that fetched petabytes of information from the web and used that to power an independent search stack.
In early 2022, the upcoming impact of generative AI and LLMs became clear to us. We embarked on an ambitious effort to seamlessly blend LLMs into our search stack. We rallied the Neeva team around the vision to create an answer engine. We are proud of being the first search engine to provide cited, real-time AI answers to a majority of queries early this year.
But throughout this journey, we’ve discovered that it is one thing to build a search engine, and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better choice. From the unnecessary friction required to change default search settings, to the challenges in helping people understand the difference between a search engine and a browser, acquiring users has been really hard. Contrary to popular belief, convincing users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place.
These headwinds, combined with the different economic environment, have made it clear that 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.
If you have a paid subscription to Neeva Premium, you will receive a refund for the unused portion of your subscription. We have more information for you in our FAQ. As part of the shutdown, we are deleting all user data. Apple iOS subscribers, please go to https://reportaproblem.apple.com/ to request your refund as soon as possible.
Neeva has a passionate community of customers and users who have supported us over the past few years. They have tried out early previews of our features, given us thoughtful feedback, and given us the love and encouragement that every young team needs. We are truly grateful to our community, and we are truly sorry that we aren’t able to continue to provide the search engine that you want and deserve.
What’s next for Neeva
Over the past year, we’ve seen the clear, pressing need to use LLMs effectively, inexpensively, safely, and responsibly. Many of the techniques we have pioneered with small models, size reduction, latency reduction, and inexpensive deployment are the elements that enterprises really want, and need, today. We are actively exploring how we can apply our search and LLM expertise in these settings, and we will provide updates on the future of our work and our team in the next few weeks.
We want to thank the Neeva team for the time, effort and dedication to build Neeva. It has been an honor and privilege to take on this challenge with all of you and we could not have chosen a better set of friends and colleagues to be on this journey.