Get Ready to Pay for Web Searches 

Trust Big Tech companies to pivot at a moment’s notice. At a time when the focus of antitrust agencies are keenly watching out for monopolistic practices in search ads, these companies seem to be quietly taking a U-turn by charging users a fee for delivering better search results. And AI-based bots such as ChatGPT could be facilitating this move. 

And when one such company is headed by an individual who led Google’s ad tech business, there is no way that we cannot help notice the shift. We are talking about Neeva AI, a search engine powered to provide real-time AI search. The company is helmed by Sridhar Ramaswamy, who was part of Google’s ad tech team. 

Some months ago, Ramaswamy had claimed that cutting edge AI and large language models would differentiate the future of AI-based search from the ChatGPT model created by OpenAI, a company into which Microsoft has reportedly pumped in $10 billion. Close on the heels came news of Google’s Bard which uses the same tech to refine search results. 

Would ads finally stop messing up search results?

All of these recent developments are leading tech watchers to believe that the era of search engine competition is back again. Just to give some context, in the 1990s users had the option of multiple search engines such as Lycos, AltaVista, WebCrawler etc. before Google came along and used PageRank to enhance relevancy of web pages to queries. This led to the other companies to shut shop leaving Google as a monopoly that charged businesses to push up their page rankings. 

Now with Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s retort to its association with ChatGPT, a new war zone is appearing on the horizon. Only, this time the story has shifted from online search finding facts to actually getting answers from those bits of data. In some ways, this could be described as answer engines that use AI to move beyond facts to solutions (or answers). 

Once the AI integration is complete, these new generations of search engines would stop hunting for facts and instead provide answers to our queries – be it questions relating to hot topics or more existential ones such as “what’s the purpose of life”. Of course, it is up to us users to figure out whether these answers are accurate or mere fluff. 

Enter Neeva which bids adieu to adwords

The latest to join this war is Neeva, which was formally launched in the US and pitched as an authentic real-time AI search. The service is now available across Canada, the UK, Germany, France and Spain with roll-outs due in Australia and New Zealand. We tried using it in India and got this for an answer: 

What’s more intriguing than the actual result is the timing of Neeva’s announcement. It comes a week after Microsoft reignited the search war by introducing ChatGPT to Bing and Google responded in kind with its own version of an AI-based search engine. As readers would be aware, OpenAI came out with a paid version of ChatGPT to cover its operations cost. 

Generative AI and the future of Search

So, what’s the actual technology that we are talking about here? It is called Generative AI which is a process of creating content using algorithms. ChatGPT is trained on large language models capable of producing good (if not flawless) work such as writing essays, poems, articles and even basic level computer codes. 

Everyone who used this technology couldn’t couldn’t help but acknowledge the smarts. Some found it amazing, others responded with a Meh! while others looked at the results and wondered what could be in a few years down the road. The service has since been commercialized and left Google huffing and puffing to launch its own Bard to provide more nuanced answers. 

Neeva was always a subscription service

Of course, the era of paid searches may have gained added credibility following the arrival of ChatGPT based Bing, but Neeva itself had originally launched out of Mountain View in 2021 as a subscription-only service. It added a free ‘basic’ tier later and brought it into Europe last October, the core of its being resting on the absence of monetizing through advertisements. 

In addition, Neeva prevents third-party trackers from using personal data to display personal ads. This ads-free search environment means users won’t scroll through sponsored results in order to find the organic results they want. In some ways, Neeva resembles the search universe as it was before Google arrived on the scene. 

It works in India, but not sure how much

Though we aren’t sure of how much indexing Neeva has done around Indian web pages, the fact remains that some of the searches did yield good results. We asked Neeva about which among Mohammed Rafi and Kishore Kumar was better and its answer was generic but the links it threw up were from cited sources in real time. Here’s what it said: 

While some may say that Mohammed Rafi was clearly the superior singer, both singers have made a mark on Hindi film music. Nasir Khan offered to take Rafi to Bombay and groom him as a singer in films, which would have had a much poorer Bollywood music without the use of computers to iron out his voice and re-work the song. On the other hand, Kishore Kumar was more energetic, fun-loving, and his songs were mostly filled with passion and enthusiasm. Ultimately, it is up to the listener to decide which singer they prefer.

The citations are what make a difference 

At this level, what impressed us was the citations themselves. They helped avoid the black box controversies around AI by showing users where the information was coming from, thus encouraging higher levels of transparency while giving the content owners due credit and better chances of getting referral traffic in an organic fashion. 

In the past, Neeva founder Sridhar Ramaswamy has reiterated that finding authority websites to answer a question is how the search works and becomes fail-safe. In recent times, most search engines and search algorithms have been accused of feeding content based on your preferences whereby one never gets a contrarian view. 

Looks like the old fashioned search is back again. The question is how many of us would be willing to pay to get real stuff and not something that someone’s paid for.