IIT graduates and former Executives of Google, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, are expected to launch a private ad-free search engine, Neeva.
Nithya Satheesh
credits: Neeva
New Delhi: IIT graduates and former Executives of Google, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, are expected to launch a private ad-free search engine, Neeva, by June 2021. A few days ago, Google threatened the Australian government that if they impose too many regulations and tax burden on the Google then it would remove its search engine from Australia. Thus, the world is looking for an alternate search engine which does not show ads or steals their personal data. Neeva hopes to offer a customer-paid and client-focused alternative.
According to Ramaswamy, CEO of Neeva, Ad model has been great in providing search facility to everyone on the planet, but now there is more pressure to show more ads and not what the user wants. As per their thesis they are planning to create a much better search product that exclusively focuses on what a customer needs.
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IIT Chennai graduate Sridhar Ramaswamy served as former senior vice-president of ads and commerce at Google, and also handled its travel, shopping and search infrastructure teams. Whereas Vivek Raghunathan is an IIT Mumbai graduate and has served as the Vice-President of Monetization at YouTube.
A team of 45 employees is already working on the search engine and they are planning to roll out Neeva in 4-5 months, firstly in their home market of the US and then to English-speaking regions like Western Europe, Australia and India. Neeva has raised 37.5 Million dollar so far with equivalent investments from Greylock, Sequoia Capital and Ramaswamy himself.
Ramaswamy also said that the search engine will be different from what people are currently using i.e. providing a single window for search and queries on services like Dropbox and email accounts. Like Google, Neeva is also going to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to create rankings for searches.
A blog on Neeva also emphasis that it will and ad-free and guarantees that the data of user will never be sold in any form and also promises that after 90 days search history will be deleted by default. Whereas for Google the search history will be deleted by default in 18 months.