“On a large scale, an ad-supported product serves the business that shows you ads, but not for you.” With this in mind, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, IIT alumni and former Google executives, are poised to roll out Neeva, an ad-free, private search product that will provide a paid-for customer and customer-centric alternative by the middle of this year, at a time of growing concerns about the control of technical megaliths.
“The ad model has been great for bringing search to everyone on the planet, but over time there is more and more pressure to show more ads and not really what the user wants. Our contention is that we can make a much better search product , focusing solely on what a customer needs, ”says Ramaswamy, the CEO of Neevaduring a video call from his home in California. This is a domain the 54-year-old knows well, as he was the senior vice president of advertising and commerce at Google, as well as leading the travel, shopping and search infrastructure teams.
Raghunathan studied at IIT Mumbai and was previously Vice President Monetization at YouTube.
So it’s actually a wide variety of experiences. Likewise, Vivek was the first tech leader of what is now called the Google Assistant. So we’ve been working on the search on both sides, ”said Ramaswamy, a graduate of IIT Chennai. That’s why they felt “confident enough” that they could build the technology relatively cheaply, he adds.
With a team of 45 people in the US, the plan is to roll out Neeva in “four five months”, first in the US home market and then in English-speaking regions such as Western Europe, Australia and India. “Fortunately, we have a great team of engineers, designers and product managers, and very good funders,” says Ramaswamy. Neeva has raised $ 37.5 million to date, with equal investments from Greylock, Sequoia Capital and Ramaswamy itself.
The product will be different from what people are used to, offering a single window for searches and searches for personal information about services like Dropbox and email accounts, Ramaswamy says. “We need to rethink core technology. And on some level, things like how you search the web, how you index the basics, are similar, ”he says. Like Google, Neeva will also use AI and machine learning to create the secret sauce search rankings.
Regarding concerns that may arise regarding personal data, Ramaswamy says, “We guarantee that the product and company are designed so that personal data is indexed to serve your results, and for nothing else … We create a company that from the start, customer is first and customer only. We do everything we can to make sure this is the only real source of income. “
A blog on Neeva also reiterates its promise to be ad-free, guarantees that “your data will never be sold in any form” and promises that search history will be deleted by default after 90 days. (Google’s default is 18 months.)
Ramaswamy has worked at Google for 16 years and says he has come to believe that it is “just not healthy” to have so much control over very large tech platforms. “There are good people there, that’s not the point. If you want to make more money, the temptation to run one more ad is just very strong, ”he says, adding that what Neeva offers is a choice. “And by giving this choice, a richer internet is created.”
He is aware of the challenges of offering a paid product and the need to ensure that it is “excellent”. However, Ramaswamy says that’s the motivation for him. He cites the example of services like Spotify and Dropbox, which succeeded in segments where there was no shortage of free options, and hopes that Neeva will force their competitors to cut back on advertising as well. “… You can’t say now, I’m going to show a page full of ads … Users are going for a paid option, because too much is too much.”
Ramswamy added, “We are convinced that a certain segment of the population will see value in a superior product. And especially in the current environment of concerns about how big and how influential the tech companies are, we think we can get enough people to say ‘I just want a simple alternative, a service that I use, that I pay for’. And that’s it, you don’t have to worry about data anymore, you don’t have to worry about what else is going on. “