“On a large scale, an advertising product supports the company that displays your ads, it doesn’t serve you.” With that in mind, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, IIT graduates and former Google executives, are ready to launch Neeva, a private, ad-free search product that, by the middle of this year, hopes to offer a paid customer and the first alternative. for customers, at a time of growing concern over the control exercised by technological megaliths.
“The ad template has been great for finding everyone on the planet, but over time, there’s increasing pressure to show more ads and not exactly what the user wants. Our thesis is that we can create a much better search product, focusing exclusively on what a customer needs “, says Ramaswamy, CEO Neeva, speaking at a video call from his home in California. This is an area that the 54-year-old is well acquainted with, being a senior vice president for advertising and commerce at Google, and also leading his travel, shopping and search infrastructure teams.
Raghunathan studied at IIT Mumbai and was earlier vice president of monetization at YouTube.
“So it’s actually a wide set of experiences. Similarly, Vivek was the first technology leader in what is now called Google Assistant. So, I actually worked on the search on both sides, ”says 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 launch Neeva in “four to five months”, first in the US domestic market and then in English-speaking regions such as Western Europe, Australia and India. “Fortunately, we have an excellent team of very good engineers, designers and product managers and supporters,” says Ramaswamy. Neeva has so far raised $ 37.5 million, with equal investment from Greylock, Sequoia Capital and Ramaswamy itself.
The product will be different from what people are used to, providing a single window for searching and querying about personal data from services like Dropbox and email accounts, says Ramaswamy. “We need to rethink core technology. And at a certain level, things like the way you crawl the web, the way you index the basics are similar, ”he says. Like Google, Neeva will use AI and machine learning to create the secret sauce – search rankings.
Regarding the fears that may arise regarding personal data, Ramaswamy says: “We guarantee that the product and the company are designed so that the personal data is indexed to serve your results and for nothing else … We create a company that, from the beginning, it is the first customer and only the customer. We are very firm in making sure that this is the only source of income. ”
A blog on Neeva also reiterates its commitment to be ad-free, guarantees that “your data will never be sold in any form” and promises that your search history will be deleted by default after 90 days. (Google’s default is 18 months.)
After spending 16 years at Google, Ramaswamy says he came to believe that “it’s not healthy” to have such great control over very large technology platforms. “There are good people out there, that’s not the problem. If you have to make more money, the temptation to post another ad is very strong, ”he says, adding that what Neeva offers is a choice. “And offering this choice creates a richer Internet.”
He is aware of the challenges of offering a paid product and the need to ensure that it is “excellent”. However, says Ramaswamy, for him this is the motivation. He cites the example of services such as Spotify and Dropbox, which have succeeded in segments where there was no shortage of free options and hopes that Neeva can force its competitors to reduce ads. “… You can’t say now, I’ll display a page full of ads… Users will choose a paid option because too much is too much.”
Ramswamy adds: “We are confident that a certain segment of the population will see value in a superior product. And especially in the current environment of concern about how big and influential technology companies are, we feel 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, there are no more worries about the data, no more worries about what is happening. “