Neeva Announces Public Availability of Its Ads Free, Private Search Engine

I spent some minutes in their website and all I could find are vague promises and grandiose marketing-speak. Where's the evidence and the technical detail? Where are the privacy experts, data experts and engineers impressing me with the robustness, openness and cleverness of their system?

Mullvad, for example, excels at explaining how their privacy service works. They transparently explain how they designed a systen with privacy at the core and they're open in their processes and code. They're also independently audited. That's why I trust them.

Neeva, on the other hand, focusses on promises and not evidence. Also, when you scratch the surface they no longer seem so privacy-friendly.

Just compare the privacy policies of both companies and make your own judgement about who is truly privacy-oriented or not:

https://neeva.com/privacy https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy/#numbered https://mullvad.net/en/help/privacy-policy/

In regards to Neeva's positioning as 'private search', I don't think they have their architecture right. The best privacy-oriented services are keen on NOT knowing users. Neeva seems keen on getting their hands on all sorts of data. For users: Create an account, send payment data, sync with documents, email, calendars, etc. For users and non-users: automatic hoarding of IP, user settings, location, etc.

An idea for curation:

Content evaluated by usefulness towards solving some problem. Perhaps measured by its usefulness towards training a very narrow AI. Like what if AlphaGo’s only inputs were web pages on the topic of Go, and there were hundreds of instances of it all trained on different combinations of web pages, and competing against each other.

Probably the datacontest mapping is itself intractable until we have AGI, at which point the whole question might be moot. But what it?

In what ways is your experience degraded? You may click on an ad result at the top of the page, while the more useful result is somewhere down below. You may become constantly frustrated by having to scroll past ads that are dominating huge portions of search result pages.

But the problem goes beyond whether or not ads are present at the top of the page. Ad-monetized search engines may hesitate to present organic, non-ad-based results in ways that are easy for you to digest -- doing so might make it less likely that you click on an ad result! For example, if you're doing a shopping query, say for "best air purifiers", the search engine may hesitate to show you an easy-to-use UI with expert reviews, price history, and different possible air purifier feature sets. Showing such a "flashy UI" will make it less likely that you engage with ad results.

At Neeva, we're trying to bring you the highest quality information for your needs, no longer held back by ads. We want to present this information to you in easily digestible and transparent ways. And we want to give you more control over your search results with personalization.

Disclaimer: I'm a Neeva engineer.