Neeva search engine has launched a new feature, NeevaAI. For many search queries, it shows an answer dynamically written by an AI at the top of the list of results. Unlike language models like ChatGPT, it shows which sources it used for the answer. So, users can visit the sources to check the credibility of the information. NeevaAI can also answer questions about current circumstances.
For example, if you search for “Twitter Files”, you will get the answer: “The Twitter Files are a series of documents released by Twitter owner Elon Musk that provide insight into the company’s content moderation decisions. The documents have revealed that the CIA has been meddling in Twitter’s internal content moderation for years.4 They have also shown that the US military has been directly assisted by Twitter.” NeevaAI links the sources CBS News, MSN.com, and Fox News NY Post.
Using the links, the visitor can check the sources that NeevaAI used for the answer.
NeevaAI is currently only available to users with a US account – this can easily be toggled in the settings if you want to give it a try. The operator’s blog describes a little more Details on NeevaAI. There he also points out that NeevaAI is anything but perfect and offers feedback options in case you find errors.
AI is revolutionizing search
Even if NeevaAI is currently still in test mode, it is further evidence that language models will change search engines in the long term. It’s just a big leap when you get a ready-made answer instead of a list of links to pages that are somehow related to the search terms.
The knowledge panels, featured snippets or info boxes with which Google & Co. already list the contents of individual sites at the beginning of the search result pages for certain queries do not change this. These tools are only available for a small proportion of search queries. And a response tailored to the user’s query from information from multiple sources offers a new quality than the info boxes.
It is therefore not surprising that other search engine operators also integrate or want to integrate language models. The search engine You.com for example, YouChat launched back in December, a very similar extension to NeevaAI – although YouChat’s responses in our samples are not as sophisticated and well-documented as NeevaAI. Microsoft wants to build ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, but further details on the implementation are not yet known.
And the industry leader? Google has been drilling its search engine with artificial intelligence for a long time. Its Multitask Unified Model (MUM) should recognize what intentions searchers bring with them and react better accordingly. And Google also maintains powerful language models. However, Google has not yet shown such a coherent integration as Neeva.
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