Vivaldi teams up with Neeva for ad-free private search
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FIXED IT:
@tatsuki said in Vivaldi teams up with Neeva for ad-free private search:
We have added new player Neeva as a default search engine option for a totally ad-free search for only 4.95 amoth after the first 3 months.
Click here to see the full blog post
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Thank you for integrating Vivaldi in Android mobile. I have been using Neeva for several months now. Paying $5/month is well worth the search quality and a strong privacy step for anyone. Plus, you actually get results without scrolling half way down the page to skip ads. Thank you!
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Another provider charging 'only' $5 a month, yeah, no, I haven't seen an ad in years and DuckDuckGo exists, single one off payment, maybe, but $5 a month nah, I don't see this as a viable business model, but I may be wrong, I wish them luck it's a valid aim at least.
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@christiehmalry Don't speak so fast. So far, I'm impressed enough with this search-engine that I may be willing to pay $5 per month. I like that you can pick what news sites you want to see more of, and less of.
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@eggcorn I must admit being able to prune some of the nonsense might be good.
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I absolutely approve of developers making a living via whatever model works best for them and their customers as long as there's full, open, honest transparency about how the money is distributed, who gets a cut, etc., so users can make their own educated consumer choices.
You're asking us to trust you and a third party some of us had never heard of before this announcement. What details and facts are provided to help us know we can or should trust Neeva?
For the sake of transparency, what portion of the 5 bucks is kicked back to Vivaldi, directly or indirectly, and how?
I'll certainly do some research on Neeva. I'll gladly help support them with a subscription if the information I find is enough for my comfort. Although $5/month is steep, so Neeva needs to make me feel extremely engaged as a consumer. Removing ads, trackers and unwanted links is not enough of a product; plenty of alternatives exist that do that for free, and many who offer a lot more for a lot less than $60/year.
But I believe it's really on you, Vivaldi, to do that kind of research and share the results openly with your user base beforehand, or included with the release notes.
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Anyone know of a search engine that promises not to suppress dissent and alternative views (aka "misinformation")?
I'm interested in seeing what Google (and maybe Neeva?) go out of their way to NOT display, or bury on page 50 of the results.
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@viva2022 There's Right Dao, they say that the won't. And I'm inclined to believe them. For one thing, they have their own web crawler. They don't get their results from Google or Bing. Here's an article about Right Dao: "New Search Engine Develops Tech to Display Uncensored Results Without Tracking User Data" by Nicole Hao.
Neeva does get their search results from Bing. However, they do let you pick what news sites you want to see more of, and less of. So that looks promising too.
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I agree with Cross1. I will pay a modest one-time fee for a decent, "private" search engine. But I'm not going to pay a recurring monthly fee. I already pay a subscription fee for a VPN that helps me dodge most location based Ad's. It reports my location as being wherever the server I connect to, says it is. The truth is, even when Ad's do show up, I've ignored them for so long I don't even notice them.
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The issue with search is ALWAYS the depth of the data scraping. I'm not a fan of Google's putting lots of ads at the top, but they are generally better at finding what I am actually looking for. And they do it faster.
As to paying, it is all about added value. Will I pay to avoid ads? Maybe. If the company is actually better (as in better results) than the free choice. I pay for Google One which gives me more capacity and other features. I haven't read anything that is worth $60 per year.
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~$5 a month is simply absurd. There SHOULD be enough users at $1 a month to be plenty - even less than that at $10 a year - absurd greed aside. And for those of us retired, on a Social Security fixed income it's REALLY absurd.
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@soundoctor nobody forces you to use a paid-for service, use all the other free alternatives out there.
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I get that free-ad devs need to get money from somewhere else... but dunno, I'll stick with DuckDuckGo.
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@dude99 You make a good point. But you're not helping your case with the excessive punctuation, ALLCAPS, and all.
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How are we supposed to keep trust in vivaldi when they direct their user base to an expensive recurring service lying from the get go and engaging in the usual well known antipatterns in total contradiction with how vivaldi is introducing them.
"Neeva and Vivaldi share a desire to build privacy-friendly products that put people first" says vivaldi.
So I go on neeva's homepage to be greeted with the most overused antipattern of "try it free" that leads to a forced registration form where they both start collecting your personal data and exploiting with an illegal opt-out spam subsscription.
My experience with Neeva stopped at this point and will never go further ever. They are not to be trusted from the get go and the total opposite in their practice as how vivaldi depicted them. It is obvious that they are not putting people first and not care about the users interests.
The service might not be overpriced just expensive enough to be trageting only an elite minority but I will never know as it is impossible to give their search engine a try without jumping hoops to enter their walled garden.
Now on the private side, Neeva's privacy policy is basically: we automatically as much data as we can, we use this data to profile and track for your own security, we use many third parties to provide our services go check their privacy policies, we will disclose everything we have to governments and police, when we get bought or merge we will hand out everything we have on you to the new buyer. We will move and store your data around the world including countries where the local law strips you of privacy such as the USA.
Last point is "we can change this policy unilaterally whenever we want and if you disagree your only option is to stop using the service" which may be illegal under GDPR.So basically have no expectation of privacy, Neeva is not private at all and does not even try to. Expect them to face personal data leak at some point in the future where you will learn that personal data had the bare minimum security if at all and that your data is now added to the huge leaked databases of personal information.
From now, everything vivaldi says will be received with a high level of scrutiny for my part and I will be highly skeptic of the truthfulness of their statement.
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@yamiya , I understand that Vivaldi needs sponsors so that it can work, it is also clear that not all the links and search engines that it includes are privacy beacons, but on the other hand whether to use them or not depends entirely on the user and this is what attracts me to Vivaldi, from to be able to choose the links and search engines and eliminate the others that do not correspond to my expectations.
As criticizable as Neeva's practices are, everyone is free to use it and add it to their search engine list or ignore it, if they want. -
Registering to use Neeva, whether it costs money or not, doesn't make it private.
It's a bad choice, IMHO.
