Neeva, would-be Google competitor, is shutting down its search engine
From the article -- <i>“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.”</i><p>I give these guys and gals full marks, and massive respect, for getting the full stack of a search engine integrated (front end, ranking, indexing, crawling).<p>They regularly dealt with the #1 impediment in monopoly search, Google buying traffic. It is harder to isolate just the money they pay to third parties to redirect traffic but based on their Q1 results for 2023 it is at least $20  <i>BILLION</i> dollars a year these days.<p>Google can&#x27;t keep that up though, and given the increasing ways they have been cooking the books to make their numbers, I feel that within 5 or 6 years they will be dead or irrelevant. They certainly won&#x27;t be able to pay Mozilla and Apple to send them all their traffic and they likely won&#x27;t be able to force Android users to do the same. When a VC recently asked me what was going to happen to Google I suggested the likely outcome was that they sell themselves to Apple leaving behind just Apple and Microsoft, each with a platform, a hardware business, a search engine, and an OS.<p>Of course I figured this would have transpired by now :-) so clearly I&#x27;m pretty lame as a prognosticator.<p>That said, once the dust settles I think I know how a company could be formed around the technology known as search which would in fact be viable, but it would not have the margins that Google now enjoys.