When an organization like Google controls more than 90% of the search engine market, it’s all the time appeared near-impossible for any competitor to woo away the corporate’s customers. More lately although, that tide’s began to alter—Google’s constant flubs in defending customers’ privateness have left people on the lookout for options that received’t abuse their search engine knowledge simply to pummel them with advertisements. We’ve already seen firms like DuckDuckGo and Brave roll out their very own search merchandise to reply that demand, together with smaller upstarts, too. Now we now have one other contender: Neeva, a search engine that has all of the polish of Google’s trademark engine, however not one of the advertisements.

There’s a very good motive that Neeva appears to take at the least a couple of design cues from its largest competitor—it was created by two folks that used to work there. Ex-Googlers Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan launched the engine final yr on a subscription-based mannequin: free for the primary three months, however $4.95 every month thereafter. Now it’s attempting out a very free tier: Anyone can obtain the search engine through browser extensions for Google Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge, or they’ll obtain the Neeva search app for iOS.

You wouldn’t suppose an ad-free search would make that a lot of a distinction, however having tried out Neeva for a short while, it’s like night time and day. Google’s rightfully been chewed out by critics for designing search advertisements in a approach that makes them nigh indistinguishable from common outcomes, and attempting to parse aside the natural outcomes from paid can generally really feel like a Sisyphean job. It doesn’t assist that Google’s continually finding new methods to shove new advertisements into new corners of our search outcomes.

It’s actually cliche to say this, however opening up Neeva and seeing a full web page of search outcomes—no advertisements, no buying tabs, no promos—was like a breath of recent air. Some Neeva searches do embody a couple of widgets, however they really feel useful as a substitute of spammy. Searching for “cheesecake” offers you recipe playing cards for cheesecake. Searching “chinos” offers you movies of… tips on how to put on chinos. You may also customise your search preferences relying on what sort of widgets (or lack thereof) you wish to see on the prime of your search outcomes.

Other perks embody a built-in monitoring blocker that’s akin to one thing like Ghostery: it lets the title and variety of third-party trackers being blocked on the location, and allows you to know which domains these trackers had been attempting to ship your knowledge to.

Even with this free-to-use rollout, Neeva isn’t abandoning its subscription tier. Folks that select to drop that $4.95 every month are promised its full swath of “search and personalization features,” early entry to new options, and the possibility to sit down in on month-to-month Q&A periods with Neeva’s senior staffers. The firm additionally guarantees entry to an “Exclusive Neeva Premium NFT,” due to the present model of hell we’re residing by.

NFT’s apart, Neeva’s undoubtedly a search engine price attempting—both for the privateness protections it guarantees, or for its clear, distraction-free design. The dangerous information is that the engine is just accessible for searchers within the U.S. proper now, although it has plans to increase into India and Western Europe “soon,” in keeping with a recent interview with its co-founders.