Neeva has been pretty good in my experience, but the lack of ability to make it the default search engine in Safari (macOS and iOS) is what prevents me from using it 100%.

That's obviously not at all a knock against Neeva. Safari needs to allow more flexibility in its search engine defaults. I've filed multiple radars/requests to Apple to make this setting more flexible and/or provide Neeva as an option.

I think neeva is interesting. Once payment and a login is required it changes the incentives and opens up new feature possibilities. One cool feature is linking your private cloud document storage making search very personal.

It remains to be seen if they can get enough people to pay in order to keep going though.

They won't let me try it because they "haven't launched in my region". Presumably that's because I'm in latin america, and they're conflating location and language.

Hmm, a paid search engine - wonder how they handle the spam SEO problem, but is an interesting idea

I'm not sure how they actually do it, but it works pretty well. When I search for things I almost always find what I'm looking for. I use it both for tech and for personal stuff.