Taking on the big one
Emailed on June 26th 2020 in The Friday Forward
Perhaps in the ultimate rebellion against his former employer, Sridhar Ramaswamy, once head of Google’s $115 billion advertising arm, has founded a new search engine that neither shows ads nor profits from user data, Ramaswamy told the New York Times.
Neeva —his new search engine that looks through the web, personal files, and emails—aims to make money off of subscriptions instead. Notably, the company is not building a completely new piece of technology, and search will be powered by Microsoft’s Bing, with other information also coming from existing providers. On that pitch of a centralized, paid search platform, the company has raised some $37.5 million from Greylock and Sequoia Capital—yes that Sequoia, the one that once backed Google.
Other search engine competitors have sought to enter the battle arena wielding the lance of privacy, but haven’t threatened Google: DuckDuckGo, which shows ads but does not track users, commands a 1.4% share of the U.S. search market while Google handles 88%.