Google's former advertising chief is making an ad-free search engine

guest · Jun 20, 2020

Google's former advertising chief is making an ad-free search engine
June 20, 2020
https://www.techspot.com/news/85712-google-former-advertising-chief-making-ad-free-search.html

In context: Sridhar Ramaswamy became Google’s senior vice president for advertising and commerce in 2013. He led the $115 billion branch that was responsible for the ads that popped up on Search, YouTube, and websites with AdSense, for five years. But, fed up with Google’s profiteering and the conflict of interest that had arisen between customers and advertisers, he left the company to build his own search engine.
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YouTube works on a simple principle of profit. Videos that receive views and likes and comments are deemed successful and promoted.
Ramaswamy argues that this is the predictable result of prioritizing profit over users. If Google makes money from advertising to you, are you the user or the product?

Ramaswamy, together with another former Googler, Vivek Raghunathan, have started a company called Neeva. They’re creating a search engine that doesn’t advertise to its users at all. They’re not reinventing the wheel, though; search results are provided by Bing and it uses Apple Maps for directions.

The challenge they face is that their cosmetic and philosophical upgrade has an (unspecified) subscription fee.
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But if the product is rooted in democratic user-centric ideology, how then can it claim to only fulfill that need for paying customers?
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A Former Google Executive Takes Aim at His Old Company With a Start-Up

Sridhar Ramaswamy once ran Google’s $115 billion advertising arm. But he grew disillusioned and worried that growth was too much of a priority.

It plans to make money on subscriptions from users paying for the service.
While there is a growing awareness that free services from Google and Facebook come at the expense of personal data, many consumers — even those who express a concern about their privacy — are often unwilling to pay for an alternative.
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Neeva: A new way to search that works just for you

As the leader of Google’s advertising products until 2018, I truly believed in the benefits of an ad-supported search experience.
However, I have come to believe that ads detract from a good search experience and have also had many unintended side-effects that have large social consequences.

Enter Neeva, our vision for a private and ads-free search engine that truly puts you first. Whether you’re looking for general information, or something deeply personal—like an important email, a calendar invite, or a copy of your passport—you can be certain that your information is your own, and not sold on to advertisers as a means of targeting you with their ads.
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SAustn2 · Jun 20, 2020

No mention of privacy? Unless it's better than Duckduckgo I'll stay put.

Rasheed187 · Jun 21, 2020

Cool, will check this one out.

SAustn2 said: ↑

No mention of privacy? Unless it's better than Duckduckgo I'll stay put.
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Privacy is important, but usability and good search results even more, I really didn't like DuckDuckGo, it loads slowly on my system, that was quite a turn-off for me.

SAustn2 · Jun 21, 2020

That's cool, I do seldom use google, I had to do a reverse image search to find out the person that was chatting with me was a catfish. So I can't always slam Google, some of their tools are pretty nice .

Rasheed187 · Jun 27, 2020

SAustn2 said: ↑

That's cool, I do seldom use google, I had to do a reverse image search to find out the person that was chatting with me was a catfish. So I can't always slam Google, some of their tools are pretty nice .
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Never actually used that feature, but I see it all the the time on MTV's Catfish. BTW, here is another site that you can use: https://tineye.com

guest · Jun 29, 2020

Search engine startup asks users to be the customer, not the product
Rival privacy-focused search engine Startpage is not impressed
June 29, 2020
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...ng-vp-starts-a-subscriber-only-search-engine/

Ramaswamy's startup company, Neeva, is that "something different"—and though it, too, is a search engine, it seeks to sidestep some of Google's problems by avoiding the ads altogether. Ramaswamy says that the new engine won't show ads and won't collect or profit from user data—instead, it will charge its users a subscription fee.

Neeva's approach follows an old truism that says if you pay for something, you're a customer—but if you get it for free, you're a product. That's likely to be a very difficult sell, to a public that has come to expect a service to be "free" and doesn't often care very much about privacy aspects.
Even if we handwave the difficulty of acquiring a market, other privacy-focused players are expressing significant doubt about Neeva's approach.
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Startpage CEO Robert E.G. Beens reached out to Ars by email shortly after Neeva's launch. He expressed extreme skepticism about Neeva's model—he describes the connections to private data, personal profile building, and long-term data retention as "a hacker's dream, and a user's nightmare."

He expressed equally strong opinions about Neeva's actual privacy policy, calling it "a joke—and not a funny one," after remarking that "marketing messages can claim almost anything, but a privacy policy has legal status."
Problematic privacy policy
Neeva's Digital Bill of Rights appears to be just the sort of marketing message Beens alluded to. It makes lofty statements about users' rights to privacy, controls to data collection, data usage transparency, and user ownership of their own data. [...]
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guest · Jul 19, 2020

Would you pay for an ad-free search engine?
July 19, 2020
https://www.androidauthority.com/neeva-ad-free-search-engine-1137419/

Google’s dominant brand of web search has been one of the few constants on the World Wide Web over the past couple of decades.
All but the most privacy-conscious of us have, at least on some level, accepted trading in cookies and search history to sell advertising space as a price worth paying to conveniently find what we’re looking for online. This makes breaking Google’s grip on the market all the more difficult.

But what if you could escape all that tracking for a subscription fee? Would you pay the price for guaranteed search privacy?
What is Neeva?
This is exactly the premise of Neeva. Currently in early testing, Neeva promises a new take on the personalized search experience in exchange for a subscription fee. We don’t know the exact price yet, but the claim is it would initially cost about as much as two black coffees a month.
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Ambitious, ad-free projects like Neeva will ultimately live and die by the level of privacy they genuinely offer consumers. Advertising privacy while still gleaning user-data simply won’t cut it. Just like the VPN market, those with a proven track record come out ahead and the pretenders are quickly found out. We’ll just have to wait and see if Neeva can live up to its early promises.

The subscription-based model is popular in so many facets of online life these days, but would you pay for an ad-free search engine?
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longshots · Jul 19, 2020

Neeva was founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at YouTube). They met in the early days of search ads at Google, and came up with the idea for Neeva over hikes and coffee.
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I can imagine their conversation on the hike, ending in "We'll make millions".

Rasheed187 · Jul 25, 2020

mood said: ↑

Would you pay for an ad-free search engine?
July 19, 2020
https://www.androidauthority.com/neeva-ad-free-search-engine-1137419/
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No, I wouldn't pay for it. I would probably stick with Google.

SAustn2 · Jul 26, 2020

I will still stick with ddg I don't really see too many ads there, and for me it loads very well in Firefox, as for my privacy I'm not willing to pay extra for vpn's, my internet provider charges too much for it's true value anyway guess that's the way it is with satellite, no alternatives out in the country. I really don't have privacy anyway with the current state of government snooping. And thank you for the link Rasheed187 .

guest · Jun 30, 2021

Inside Neeva, the ad-free, privacy-first search engine from ex-Googlers
June 29, 2021
https://www.fastcompany.com/9065071...le-alternative-privacy-sridhar-ramaswamy-tech

A new search engine? One that people have to pay to use?

At first blush, it may seem like a textbook example of a startup idea destined never to get anywhere. By definition, any new search engine competes with Google, whose 90 percent-plus market share leaves little oxygen for other players.
But Neeva is indeed a new search engine, officially launching today, that carries a subscription fee. 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.
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It’s free for three months—long enough for users to grow accustomed to it without obligation—and $4.95 a month thereafter. Apps for iPhones and iPads, and browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Brave, are part of the deal.
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Rasheed187 · Jul 3, 2021

I seriously don't see how this will become a success. I don't think people mind ads that much as long as the search results are good.

guest · Nov 8, 2021

Going Google-free: Neeva gives search result control and context back to the user
November 8, 2021
https://www.zdnet.com/article/going...results-control-and-context-back-to-the-user/

Search engines are step zero for users wanting to find any content on the internet -- they are built into our browsers, our mobile devices, and our content streaming products. All you need to do is start typing the name of something, and suddenly, you have results.

But are these really the results you want? How do we know if they are trusted sources? How do we know how these content providers are financed? Are they ad-supported, have a political bias, or provide authoritative information as the original information providers or sources of genuine expertise?
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Neeva, a new search engine being developed by ex-Google executive Sridhar Ramaswamy -- who once ran the company's $115B advertising business -- wants to return context and control of the search engine experience back to the end-user.

Part of that bringing control and context back is its partnership with NewsGuard.
Whenever you perform a search on Neeva -- which is installable as an extension on Chrome or Edge browsers or as an app on iOS -- it will provide you with the ability to dig deeper into the content source being shown in the search results and display NewsGuard's summary ratings as well as its full nutritional label and report.
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Currently, you can evaluate Neeva for free for five months after you set it up, but the service will cost $4.95 per month when your trial is over.
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guest · Oct 6, 2022

Neeva search engine launches in Germany, France and the United Kingdom
By Martin Brinkmann - October 6, 2022

Search engine Neeva announced today that it launched officially in the three European countries Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

Neeva is one of several search startups that is taking on the heavyweights Google Search and Bing. Founded by two former Google employees, it is an attempt to move away from the current advertisement-influenced search model towards one that is more user-friendly and useful.
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Not only is Neeva promising an ad-free search environment, it is also guaranteeing that users are not tracked and that search results are not biased. Other features that set it apart from traditional search engines are options to customize the search experience, by prioritizing or downgrading certain sites or sources, or link to accounts on sites such as Dropbox, Figma or Slack, to include personal files in search results.
Closing Words
It remains to be seen how ad-free search engines like Neeva or Kagi fare in the coming months and years. There is certainly a market for unbiased and ad-free search results, but it is not clear how many Internet users are willing to pay for that privilege. Both services need paying customers in the future to finance operations.
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Neeva: Neeva Launches in Europe

Today, Neeva has launched in Europe to rival Google, by giving web users honest search results, no tracking, and absolutely no advertisements or affiliate links. Now, users in the UK, Germany, and France will see the full Neeva experience including localized results for stocks, weather, restaurants, and more.

Neeva’s CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy said:

“Neeva is a user-first platform focused on private, transparent searches versus a search engine serving advertisers. The internet should be your private corner of the web instead of a barrage of ads, SEO spam and irrelevant information. We’re reinventing search by giving users control over sources; providing accurate and transparent results as well as private and customized experiences without the influence of corporate bias, tracked around the web.”
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Rasheed187 · Oct 6, 2022

mood said: ↑

Neeva search engine launches in Germany, France and the United Kingdom
By Martin Brinkmann - October 6, 2022

Neeva: Neeva Launches in Europe
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Not sure what to think, why don't they just launch it worldwide? And I'm not impressed by the webpage design, it has this annoying lag when loading, similar to DuckDuckGo. That's why I always stayed with Google. So for now I'm very skeptical.

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