Google’s former head of advertising is building a rival search product that will allow users to look for information without ads.
Neeva, now in beta, is an attempt to personalise search and remove ads. The Google rival is built to deliver ad-free searches and to simplify results.
Founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy, the executive who was in-charge of Google’s $115 billion advertising division, and Vivek Raghunath, ex-VP of monetisation at YouTube, Neeva is designed to keep user behaviour tracking at bay.
“A lack of competition in the search space is bad for innovation and bad for users,” Sridhar Ramaswamy wrote in a blog post.
“We need more search engines, offering different kinds of experiences and preferences, to fit people’s individual needs.”
Beyond web searches, Neeva can also be set up as a personal search tool that will look for a user’s email or calendar entry when they do a search. The company claims that it will not use any of the data from its users.
The search tool will be in beta until the end of this year. The company is giving access to an initial list of users who wish to sign up. After this period, perhaps in 2021, it will be a subscription-based product.
Neeva is funded by venture capital firms Greylock and Sequoia, and Mr. Ramaswamy. The company has recruited engineers who have earlier built products at Google, Snap, WhatsApp and Dropbox.
