Search Engine “Neeva” to be Launched by Ex-Google Ads Head, S.Ramaswamy

According to reports, Search Engine Neeva won’t have any ads and will be on Subscription basis.

Over the past several years, a good number of search engines have tried to give a competition to the industry giant Google but as we all know, all the attempts end up being a failure. Even Microsoft’s Bing couldn’t give a noticeable competition and never could manage to acquire a double-digit market share in any of the markets that they operate.

However, things are moving to a different direction of late as DuckDuckGo slowly have started to capture a significant amount of market share depending on their recent focus on “Privacy” theme. And now with the recent developments, where the Ex-Google Ads head himself announcing that he is planning to enter the market with his new gig “Neeva”, Google might finally face some significant challenge in terms of competition in the Kingdom where they are ruling for the last two decades.

Sridhar Ramaswamy left Google in 2018 over differences of opinion with the management on choosing the priority between Quality content and ad revenue. He was quoted saying “The relentless pressure to maintain Google’s growth had come at a heavy cost to the company’s users. Useful search results were pushed down the page to squeeze in more advertisements, and privacy was sacrificed for online tracking tools to keep tabs on what ads people were seeing.”

Neeva will be “Ad-free”:

According to the New York Times, Mr. Ramaswamy is now getting ready with the launch of his dream project “Neeva” and announce direct competition to Google.

The first and foremost differentiator that the new search engine will have is it will be without any ads and subscription based. According to the report, the platform will be personalized and will not track-back any user. If the claims are to be believed, the personalization will be achieved without any data-mining. So far Mr. Ramaswamy has been able to get 25 employees on-boarded for the new project and have managed to raise $37.5 Million in funding.

The report also suggest that Neeva has no plans of redefining Search, rather it will use the existing content banks like Bing search results, Apple Maps, Weather.com etc. It will also search the personal files within a system like eMails and local documents.

Sridhar Ramaswamy also mentioned that the new search engine will initially be offered to users as “Free”. However, moving forward there will be a subscription fee for each user and the aim for him is to keep it under $10 with an aim of reducing it further with getting more and more subscribers on-board.

While most of the subscription based businesses have failed to attract a majority of customers, more so when a reputed and free alternative present. It will be extremely interesting to see whether Neeva can break the myth and eventually throw a tough competition to Google.