With all of the news and hype surrounding chatbot AI as the new way to search for info on the internet, a startup company has expanded its own search AI product to other countries. TechCrunch reports that Neeva, which launched its AI-powered search engine in the US in January, has now expanded its reach to some other countries, including Canada, the UK, Germany, France, and Spain. It adds that the non-AI Neeva search engine is now available in Australia and New Zealand.
What is Neeva? It has created a search browser extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and others, along with iOS and Android apps. It basically works the same as other search engines; there"s a search box where you type in what you want to find out.
However, the NeevaAI feature is designed to not be fooled by questions that don"t really have a correct answer. TechCrunch offers an example of such a search query: "When was Boris Johnson King of the United Kingdom?" Of course, he was never king; he was the UK"s Prime Minister. NeevaAI said it was unable to "generate an AI summary" because there was simply not enough info on that "fact". When it can respond to a question it either generates links to other sites, or creates an AI summary based on info from those sites, with sources.
While there is a free version of Neeva available, the company is hoping to generate its revenue from its Premium subscription of $5.99 a month or $49.99 for an annual plan. It adds unlimited searches with no ads, a password manager, a VPN, and an unlimited number of devices on the same account.
Neeva"s international launch has come just as Google revealed its chatbot AI, Bard, and Microsoft revealed the new chatbot-enabled Bing search engine last week.