“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.”

Developed by a team of former Google employees, Neeva offers private, ad-free search. Since launching, it has garnered loads of positive reviews.

Search--and online experience in general--is bad and getting worse. That's the premise behind Neeva.

“Perhaps in the ultimate rebellion against his former employer, Sridhar Ramaswamy, once head of Google’s $115b advertising arm, has founded a new search engine that neither shows ads nor profits from user data.”

“Neeva users will pay...to get the search results they want rather than what advertisers want them to see.”

Would You Give Up Google for This?

After being rolled out to paying subscribers last year, Neeva's now free to download for anyone who's sick of ads in their searches.

The search engine from ex-Googlers would still like you to pay. But it thinks it’ll be easier to make the sale to users who have lived with the product.

Search--and online experience in general--is bad and getting worse. That's the premise behind Neeva.

Developed by a team of former Google employees, Neeva offers private, ad-free search. Since launching, it has garnered loads of positive reviews.

Named “FastTap Search,” the feature allows users to bypass traditional search engine results pages and head directly to a site via the list of links generated based on the query.

When the search business no longer relies on advertisers for revenue, it gets the freedom to dream up new ideas and build the type of search experience that couldn’t exist before.

Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan helped turn Google into an ad giant. Now they’re starting over with a service whose only customers are its users.

Neeva's pitch is pretty simple: It's search without the ads. It's a cleaner, nicer-looking system, and one that doesn't try to game users into clicking on things they didn't want.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, former Google Ads SVP and Neeva CEO, joins ‘Tech Check’ to discuss how his subscription-based search engine which will take on Google and makes the case for why people would pay for search.

Neeva, founded by former Google executives, will charge $4.95 per month. Sridhar Ramaswamy says the project could not have been attempted at his former company.

Giants like Facebook and Google have long resisted the concept of paying newspapers and information services they link to or include in feeds, but Neeva is willing to share income with partners.

Neeva says it will commit to sharing "at least 20%" of its revenue with content creators, offering payouts when their content directly answers a user's search query.

Neeva said it would share at least 20% of its sales with content partners such as Quora and Medium in another break from search giant Google, which for years has faced criticism for not remunerating publishers.

We see our long-term responsibility in supporting the monetization of long-tail content in ways that don’t all completely depend on ads.

The goal is to create a deeply personal search engine that can trawl through emails and other files to provide the most relevant information.

“Neeva users will pay...to get the search results they want rather than what advertisers want them to see.”

“...Neeva’s most radical departure from the Google playbook is that it charges a subscription, promising fewer ads and greater privacy.”

“Sridhar Ramaswamy, sees an opportunity—he is developing a search engine that will be ad-free and focused on giving people the best results.”

“Neeva is developing a paid, privacy-focused search engine … ‘We hope the DOJ’s actions will create a more equal playing field for search apps like Neeva that want to create real options for customers.’”

“Part of my reason for starting Neeva was I did not want this very important function [search] to become a monoculture,’ says Ramaswamy.”

“His [Sridhar Ramaswamy’s] bet is that an engine spitting out ad-free results — with other features, such as an ability to scan personal data stored on, say, your laptop — will be a compelling alternative.”

“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.”

“Perhaps in the ultimate rebellion against his former employer, Sridhar Ramaswamy, once head of Google’s $115b advertising arm, has founded a new search engine that neither shows ads nor profits from user data.”

Neeva: The Everything Engine. No matter what you’re looking for, or where it is, Neeva will help you find it, often with only one click.

The consumer welfare standard has really become a “corporate welfare standard,” paving the way for a handful of companies to insulate themselves from competition and amass unprecedented market share and power over our daily lives.

Neeva, the Google competitor run by Ramaswamy, promises an ad-free experience that will search both the web and information on your own computer while protecting your privacy — for a subscription fee

The company opened up its free service to everyone last year and introduced its premium options in January 2022. Now, it has over half a million monthly active users, and since January has been growing active users more than 20% per month.

Those already in the Neeva club are enthusiastic, and I can see why. The absence of the tricksy ads was like being catapulted to an Alpine retreat – after years in the urban smog, you forget how fresh air feels.

What differentiates Neeva from Google? Three things: 1) Control over the ranking of sources in your search results. 2) Transparency about these sources. 3) Deep integrations to bring rich previews and answers directly to you.

Regulators and policymakers need to step in if they care for competition in search. The market needs crawl neutrality, similar to net neutrality.

“No ads” means Neeva doesn’t have an incentive to collect data on its users, making it the only search engine on the market that’s both ad-free with a privacy option.

Imagine one company in charge of supplying water for the entire planet... a for-profit company. Search and access to information is as basic, and you have one company in charge of this.

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Former Google ads boss Sridhar Ramaswamy says that we live in a world that seems to give out free content when we use a search engine. But that world comes with a hidden cost–search results that distort what we find and serve advertisers rather than searchers.