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Privacy-focused search company Neeva recently said it will shut down neeva.com and its consumer search product will shut down in the next few weeks.

“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,” the company said in the blog post.

As part of the shutdown, the California-based company is deleting all user data. Users with paid subscriptions will get a refund for the unused portions. Neeva has more than 600,000 users, the majority of whom are on a free plan.

“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,” it added.

According to the post, the company plans to explore use cases for generative AI and larger language models in search.

Founded by former Google executives Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan in 2019, Neeva is a private, ad-free search engine and browser.

“We built a search stack from the ground up, running a crawl that fetched petabytes of information from the web and using that to power an independent search stack,” the blog reads.

The co-founders added, “Building search engines is hard. 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.”

As the duo faced challenges acquiring new users, and combined with the economic environment, “have made it clear that there is no longer a path towards creating a sustainable business in consumer search,” they stated.