IIT grads, ex-Google execs able to roll out ad-free search engine

“At scale, an ad-supported product serves the company that shows you ads, it does not serve you.” With this thought, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, IIT alumni and former Google executives, are able to roll out Neeva, an ad-free, personal search product, which, by the center of this yr, hopes to supply a customer-paid and customer-first different, at a time of rising issues over the management wielded by tech 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 thesis is that we can create a much better search product, focusing solely on what a customer needs,” says Ramaswamy, the CEO of Neeva, talking on a video name from his California residence. This is a website the 54-year-old is aware of properly, having been the senior vice-president of advertisements and commerce at Google, and likewise run its journey, buying and search infrastructure groups.
Raghunathan studied at IIT Mumbai and was earlier vice-president of Monetisation at YouTube.
“So it’s actually a broad set of experiences. Similarly, Vivek was the first tech lead of what is now called the Google Assistant. So we’ve actually worked on search on both sides,” Ramaswamy says, a graduate from IIT Chennai. This is why they felt “confident enough” that they may construct the know-how comparatively inexpensively, he provides.
With a 45-person staff within the US, the plan is to roll out Neeva in “four-five months”, first within the residence market of the US after which English-speaking areas like Western Europe, Australia and India. “Fortunately we have a great team of engineers, designers and product managers, and very good backers,” says Ramaswamy. Neeva has raised $37.5 million to this point, with equal investments from Greylock, Sequoia Capital and Ramaswamy himself.
The product shall be completely different from what individuals are used to, providing a single window for search and queries into private knowledge on companies like Dropbox and electronic mail accounts, Ramaswamy says. “We have to rethink the core technology. And at some level, things like how you crawl the web, how you index the basics are similar,” he says. Like Google, Neeva may even use AI and machine studying to create the key sauce — rankings for searches.
On apprehensions which will come up concerning private knowledge, 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 are creating a company that, from the beginning, is customer first and customer only. We are very adamant about making sure that this is the one and only revenue source.”
A weblog on Neeva additionally reiterates its dedication to be ad-free, ensures that “your data will never be sold in any form whatsoever”, and guarantees that search historical past shall be deleted by default after 90 days. (Google’s default is eighteen months.)
Having spent 16 years at Google, Ramaswamy says he has come to consider that it’s “just not healthy” to have very giant tech platforms management a lot. “There are good people there, that’s not the issue. If you need to make more money, the temptation to show one more ad is just very strong,” he says, including that what Neeva gives is a alternative. “And giving this choice creates a richer Internet.”

He is conscious of the challenges of providing a paid product, and the necessity to make sure that it’s “excellent”. However, Ramaswamy says, for him that’s the motivation. He cites the instance of companies like Spotify and Dropbox, which succeeded in segments the place there was no dearth of free choices, and hopes that Neeva may additionally drive their rivals to chop again on advertisements. “… You can’t now say, I’m going to show a page full of ads… Users are going to go for a paid option, because too much is too much.”
Ramswamy provides, “We feel confident that a certain segment of the population will see value in a superior product. And especially in the current environment of worry, about how large and how influential the tech companies are, we feel we can get enough people who say ‘I just want a simple alternative, a service that I use, that I pay’. And that’s it, there’s no more worry about data, there’s no more worry about what else is going on.”