“On a scale, an ad-supported product serves the company that shows your ads, it does not offer you.” With this in mind, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, IIT alumni and former executives of Google, are ready for Neeva, an ad-free, private search product, which by mid-year hopes to become a customer-paid and first-rate alternative for the customer, at some point of increasing concern about the control exercised by technological megaliths.
‘The ad model was ideal for bringing search to everyone on the planet, but over time there’s more and more pressure to show more ads and not really what the user wants. Our thesis is that we can create a much better search product, and focus only on what a customer needs, ‘he says Ramaswamy, CEO of Neeva, during a video call from his home in California. This is a domain that the 54-year-old knows well, as he was the senior vice president of advertising and commerce at Google, and also managed his team for travel, shopping and search infrastructure.
Raghunathan is studying at IIT Mumbai and was previously Vice President for Monetization on YouTube.
‘So it’s actually a wide range of experiences. Similarly, Vivek was the first technological leader of what is currently called the Google Assistant. So we worked on both sides on search, ”says Ramaswamy, a graduate of IIT Chennai. That’s why they had “enough confidence” that they could build the technology relatively cheaply, he adds.
With a 45-member staff in the US, the plan is to export Neeva within ‘four to five months’, first in the US market and then English-speaking regions such as Western Europe, Australia and India. “Fortunately, we have an excellent team of engineers, designers and product managers and very good supporters,” says Ramaswamy. Neeva has so far raised $ 37.5 million with equal investments from Greylock, Sequoia Capital and Ramaswamy itself.
The product will differ from what people are used to, and provides a single window for searches and queries to personal data about services such as Dropbox and email accounts, Ramaswamy says. “We need to rethink nuclear technology. And on a certain level, things like how you search the internet, and how you index the basics, are similar, “he says. Like Google, Neeva will also use AI and machine learning to create the secret sauce – rankings for searches.
Regarding concerns that may arise regarding personal data, Ramaswamy says: ‘We guarantee that the product and the company are designed so that personal data is indexed to deliver your results, and for nothing else … We create a company which from the beginning a customer first and only customer. We are very determined to make sure that it is the only source of income. ”
A blog about Neeva also reiterates its commitment to being ad-free, guaranteeing “your data will never be sold in any form”, and promising that the search history will be removed after 90 days by default. (Google’s default is 18 months.)
After spending 16 years at Google, Ramaswamy says he believes it is “just not healthy” to let very large technology platforms control so much. ‘There are good people, that’s not the case. If you have to make more money, the temptation to show another ad is just very strong, ‘he says, adding that Neeva 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’. Ramaswamy, however, says that is the motivation for him. He cites the example of services such as Spotify and Dropbox, which have succeeded in segments where there has been no shortage of free options, and hopes that Neeva can also force its competitors to reduce advertising. “… You can not say now I am going to show a page full of ads … Users are going to opt for a paid option because too much is too much.”
Ramswamy adds: ‘We feel confident that a certain section of the population will see value in a better product. And especially in the current environment of concern, about how big and influential the technology ventures are, we feel we can get enough people saying, ‘I just want a simple alternative, a service I use and what I pay ‘. And this is it, there is no more worry about data, there is no more worry about what else is going on. ”