Former Google employees launched the first paid search engine. The future of the Internet depends on its success.

Two former top Google executives built a search engine without ads and with privacy protection, and now they hope to attract people who are tired of the “they are a product.” A search engine subscription (weird phrase, right?) Costs $ 4.95 per month. The company has already raised $ 77.5 million and employs 60 people, 30% of whom previously worked for Google. The creators expect to take away a few percent of search traffic, and there, perhaps, change our attitude towards advertising on the Web.

Social experiment

Neeva executives say they are betting that the way Google is monetizing its search and other services is outdated. Advertising monetization, this original sin, which appeared at the dawn of the Internet, they think, is gradually becoming a thing of the past.

Neeva Team

Google has been doing this monetization for over two decades. Technologies have been worked out to the maximum, this is an incredibly profitable and effective business. But the user experience, the proverbial UX, is getting worse. For the sake of advertising and advertisers, which inevitably become a priority for a site with such a business model.

Once upon a time, we were shown a couple of unobtrusive ads in the block to the right of the search results. Then these ads were added to the very top of the search results. Then they became more and more, and they lost the characteristic background color, which made it possible to quickly distinguish them from non-advertising. As a result, for many popular search queries, there are more ads on the user’s first screen than regular results.

In addition, some of these “normal” results lead to Google’s own services, and it has been confirmed that the company is giving them an unfair priority. In Europe, Alphabet for this fined by € 2.42 billion: they found that she was secretly promoting her Google Shopping (before that – Froogle).

That is, even if Google’s search algorithms are better than everyone else’s, such an advantage makes little sense to the user if the search results cannot be 100% trusted. And, according to the creators of Neeva, there are people who would find it easier to pay $ 4.95 a month than scrolling down the page 20-50 times every day to see “real” results that no one paid for.

Sridhar Ramaswami, CEO of Neeva, says:

For me, this is not only a technological but also a social experiment. If there was a quality product that clearly benefited you, would you pay for it? Or would you rather use the free one and put up with the gradual absorption of it by advertising?

The creators of the search engine expect that the old conventional wisdom that no one is willing to pay for anything on the Internet has finally died. More than 200 million people pay for Netflix. 158 million pay for Spotify. Nearly 7 million pay for digital access to The New York Times; 700,000 pay for Medium. This is despite the fact that all of these services are full of free alternatives. People are starting to get used to the fact that you can pay to consume content without ads, and that’s fine.

Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at New York Business School, entrepreneur and co-investor in Neeva, says:

The addictive nature of searching, getting answers to questions, or interacting with people is a kind of nicotine. It’s bad for you, addictive, but not cancer-causing. What’s causing you cancer, local tobacco if you will, is an advertising model. Because in the end, over time, all the company becomes focused on is collecting additional consumer data in order to monetize it in the future.

And it ends with what you now see with Google. Where Google no longer directs you to the best place based on your query, but offers a place where they can continue to monetize you and collect information.

Google uses data about user activity for targeted advertising not only on its sites, but also on any other resources where ads that go through the company are embedded. Independent of advertising, Neeva deprives privacy-concerned users of the feeling that they are constantly being watched for some selfish purpose.

The difference in search results, Google vs Neeva

With the subscription model, the product is clearly the service, not the user. The only problem is to become a sufficiently high-quality product, especially considering that the team is still small, and the competitor started 23 years earlier.

Nonetheless, Ramaswami believes that even if they convince only one or two percent of users to switch to paid search, it will be a huge success. Because each subscriber, being a direct buyer, will be a hundred times more valuable to his company than one user from Google. And from there, you can already begin to change the opinion of others. And gradually go to the Internet, where users are not a product, as in current platforms.

The company doesn’t do it all alone. Neeva has independently indexed several billion web pages, but at the bottom of their site, you can see that they also take data from Apple, Bing, Yelp. Providers also include Intrinio, Weather.com and Xignite. Even Google has not escaped the fate: Google Maps are embedded in the search results.

Vivek Raghunatan, one of the co-founders, explains:

If we can license or buy something, we will. Users don’t care. And so we will do what makes sense for users to build the most useful and enjoyable product possible.

Outwardly, Neeva is also very similar to Google. This is no coincidence: the task of the platform at this stage is not to alienate new users. But if you ask something in the search, the difference between the two systems becomes noticeable immediately. If Google has ads at the top of the search, Neeva has regular links there. For the query “best laptops” Google shows several lines with partner sites, Neeva – peer reviews and reviews. Limitations, however, are also visible: these reviews come only from a few sites, and PCMag’s opinion is given high priority.

Neeva’s search results can be expanded in the same window to read more detailed previews without leaving the search results.

Another distinctive feature of the platform is integration with third-party services. You can connect Neeva to information sources such as Gmail, Outlook, Google Drive, or Dropbox. You can link your Slack or Jira account. And then Neeva will include materials from them in the results of your search – on a special tab “Personal”. Google has experimented with similar concepts in the past: once it incorporated Gmail results into Google searches, but then abandoned the concept.

Breaking with search engine tradition, Neeva says it will donate at least 20% of its revenue to publishing partners it displays in search results. She has already announced the first two: Quora and Medium. Perhaps this is another way for the company to differentiate itself from Google, which has often been accused of using media content without adequate compensation.

Those media that you trust can be “liked” so that they appear in the SERP

DuckDuckGo’s experience shows that there is a market for such search engines. That project, which started in 2008 with one programmer, now has a team of 129 employees and estimated $ 1 billion, recently having received another $ 100 million from investors.

• From June 29, the search engine is available at https://neeva.com/… But not for all regions and not for all users (the company is still actively testing it).
• Neeva chose “There are no ads here” and “You are not a product” as slogans.
• According to the company, the search engine will still be refined, and several major launches are planned in July – they are supposed to improve the service and add new functions.
• The first 3 months the search engine will be free, then – $ 4.95 per month. This price includes the Neeva iPhone and iPad apps, as well as extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Brave browsers.
• By default, Neeva stores searches for 90 days to improve suggestions, but the user can delete the history and prevent it from being saved at any time.

At the moment, the Neeva search engine is not available in Russia, therefore, in order to use it, you will need a VPN with the IP address of another country (the USA is recommended as one of the countries with the launch at the start). Relevant delivery of Russian-language sites is not guaranteed.

A more detailed analysis of the new service, its founders and prospects can be (in English) to honor from Fast Company.

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