Once famously unobtrusive, the ads displayed with search results have gradually migrated from the right column to the top of search results, multiplied in number and size, and lost the shaded box that isolated them from organic results. Instead, it remains the category’s leading engine of innovation: Google says that it rolled out 4,500 improvements last year alone.īut some of the downsides of Google’s dependence on ad revenues are right before our eyes. Over the years, unlike some products with monopolistic market share- Microsoft’s Internet Explorer comes to mind-the search behemoth hasn’t calcified through lack of competition. Looming antitrust case aside, it’s not that Google is all that obviously vulnerable. And Brave, the browser company founded by web pioneer Brendan Eich, is beta-testing its own privacy-first search engine and says free and for-pay versions will be available.) DuckDuckGo has been on its own for 13 years once a one-man operation, it now has 129 employees and $100 million in annual revenue from ads that don’t involve tracking individual users. (Which is not to say there aren’t other ambitious privacy-centric search engines on journeys at least somewhat similar to Neeva’s. “Sridhar and Vivek, with their depth of knowledge on everything from technology to what people actually need and do, are probably the only people in the world where I would go, ‘Okay, I’ll go on this journey with you, because you know how to go on this journey,'” says Greylock partner and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. Whatever the answer to that question, Neeva’s creators understand what they’re getting into. “It’s looking for the answer to the question, ‘If there was a high-quality product that clearly benefits you in multiple ways, would you pay for it as opposed to having it be free, supported by ads?'” “I tell people that Neeva is as much a social experiment as it is a technological experiment,” says Ramaswamy, the company’s CEO. Sridhar Ramaswamy At its highest level, Neeva represents a bet that the way Google monetizes search and other services through advertising-as it’s done for more than two decades to wildly profitable effect-has hampered its user experience, thereby opening up an opportunity. They’ve also secured $77.5 million in funding, including investments from venture-capital titans Greylock and Sequoia. Moreover, about 30 percent of the roughly 60-person staff they’ve assembled at Neeva consists of ex-Googlers, including Hall-of-Famers such as Udi Manber (a former head of Google search) and Darin Fisher (one of the inventors of Chrome). Two long-time Google executives with more than a quarter-century of experience at the web giant between them, they have an insider’s understanding of how it operates. Neeva may have a certain whiff of improbability about it, but its cofounders, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, are the furthest thing from naïfs. Apps for iPhones and iPads, and browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Brave, are part of the deal. It’s free for three months-long enough for users to grow accustomed to it without obligation-and $4.95 a month thereafter. Though it’s extremely similar to Google in many respects-with a few twists of its own-it dumps the web giant’s venerable ad-based business model in the interest of avoiding distractions, privacy quandaries, and other compromises. And we’ve been accustomed to getting our search for free since well before there was a Google-which might make paying for it sound like being expected to purchase a phone book.īut Neeva is indeed a new search engine, officially launching today, that carries a subscription fee. By definition, any new search engine competes with Google, whose 90 percent-plus market share leaves little oxygen for other players. At first blush, it may seem like a textbook example of a startup idea destined never to get anywhere.
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