Neeva, the search engine co-founded in 2019 by former Google employees Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, has announced it is shutting down.

“Over the next few weeks, we will be shutting down neeva.com and our consumer search product and moving to a new focus area,” reads a post on Neeva’s website.

The search engine was once thought to compete with tech giant Google by offering ad-free and privacy-focused internet searches.

The co-founders said they would delete all user data, adding that they were proud to be the first to adopt a large language model (LLM) system with their search engine earlier this year.

The co-founder cited the challenge of convincing regular users that they need to switch search engines and the “unnecessary friction” required to change default search settings as reasons for the shutdown.

A statement from the company mentioned that getting users to switch to a new browser is a bigger challenge than getting users to pay for ad-free surfing.

“Contrary to popular belief, convincing users to pay for a better experience is actually easier than getting them to try a new search engine first,” Neeva said in her post.

The post also mentions that Neeva will refund subscription fees paid for Neeva Premium. Neeva also spoke at length about the company’s future plans, including working with LLM and integrating AI with search engines.

“Over the past year, it has become clear to us that there is an urgent need to use LLM effectively, cheaply, safely and responsibly. We are actively exploring how our search and LLM expertise can be applied in these environments and we will provide an update on the future of our work and our team in the coming weeks,” Neeva said.