Former Google executive takes aim at his old company
Neeva looks for information on the web as well as personal files like emails and other documents
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA
By the end of his 15 years at Google, Sridhar Ramaswamy, then the executive in charge of the company’s $115 billion (Dh422 billion) advertising arm, had grown disillusioned with the business he had helped build.
The relentless pressure to maintain Google’s growth, he said, 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.
TESTING HIS NEWFOUND CONVICTION
The final straw came in November 2017 when news reports found videos of scantily clad children on YouTube featuring ads from Deutsche Bank, Amazon, eBay and Adidas. The advertisements were served automatically by the technology systems overseen by Ramaswamy’s team.
“I decided the following month that I needed to do something different with my life,” Ramaswamy said in a recent interview. “I came to realise that an ad-supported model had limitations.”
Nearly two years after he left Google, he is testing his newfound conviction by mounting a challenge against his former employer. His new company, Neeva, is a search engine that looks for information on the web as well as personal files like emails and other documents. It will not show any advertisements and it will not collect or profit from user data, he said. It plans to make money on subscriptions from users paying for the service.
HURDLE OF GETTING PEOPLE TO PAY
As evidenced by the antitrust investigations into Google’s businesses, challenging the company is no easy task. Google accounts for roughly 90 per cent of all searches globally and competitors have tried unsuccessfully for years to make inroads.
Neeva faces the additional hurdle of getting people to pay for something that many have come to expect as free. 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.
Neeva recalls a notion raised, ironically, by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in a 1998 research paper when they were doctoral students at Stanford University. They wrote, at the time, that “advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”
Search advertising has become much more sophisticated since the 1990s, but much of the same “conflicts of interest” remains, according to Ramaswamy.
He pointed to how Google has devoted more space to ads at the top of search results with the results users are seeking pushed down the page — an issue more pronounced on smaller smartphone screens.
Google said it did extensive user testing and found that people see “relevant ads and offers extremely useful.”
“Ads make Google Search free for everyone, and we only show them on a very small fraction of overall queries,” said Chi Hea Cho, a Google spokeswoman.
One search competitor said ads did not have to come with privacy concerns, either. Gabriel Weinberg, chief executive of DuckDuckGo, a privacyminded alternative to Google, said subscriptions turned privacy into a luxury. DuckDuckGo presents ads but it says it does not track user behaviour.
“If you want the most impact to help the most people with privacy, you have to be free because Google will be free forever,” he said.
Neeva has not set a price for its subscription. It will be free for initial users until the end of the year. After that, Ramaswamy said he aimed to charge a monthly subscription of less than $10 and he hopes to bring the price down over time as more users sign up.
We felt very strongly that there needed to be alternatives, alternative viewpoints, and alternative business models.”
Sridhar Ramaswamy | Founder of start-up Neeva