Startup ‘Neeva’ gears up to take on Google search engine

For over 22 years, Google has been the most predominant web search engine in the world. Vivek Raghunathan and Sridhar Ramaswamy, former Google executives and IIT alumni, a start-up company is gearing up to take on Google with a new search engine called “Neeva”. ‘Neeva’ will be the first advertisement free search engine with absolute data safety.

However, there are a few alternatives to Google Search engine in the market, for example, DuckDuckGo, which also guarantees information security. ‘Neeva’ wishes to provide a customized search experience explicitly for the users. The start-up is aiming to launch the search engine by mid-2021. 

The Neeva CEO Ramaswamy was the former Senior Vice President of Ads & Commerce’, for Google’s $115 billion advertising business. Raghunathan graduated from IIT Mumbai and was VP of Monetization at YouTube before. 

According to Ramaswamy, the ad-model takes over the real-content in the long run. “There is an increasing pressure to show more advertisements and not actually what the client needs. We can create much better search product, zeroing in exclusively on what a client needs,” he told The Indian Express.

Neeva will permit clients to directly search for personal information saved on services like Dropbox and email accounts. “We need to reconsider the core technology, for example, the fundamentals of how you crawl or index the web,” he added. Like Google, ‘Neeva’ will likewise utilize machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Neeva has published a ‘Bill of Rights’ on its site that explains how the start-up will work and gather user data. It asserts that clients’ information will be safe and won’t be sold to anyone. ‘Neeva’ has collected $37.5 million until this point, with equivalent investments from Sequoia Capital, Greylock, and Ramaswamy himself. 

“First, we will cater to the US market and then the English-speaking countries like Western Europe, Australia, and India. We have a great team of architects, product managers, and designers with a very good backer,” says Ramaswamy. 

We know that there is a great challenge in offering a paid product, and the need to guarantee that it is best. “We are confident that a specific section of the population will recognize the importance of a superior product”. 

“Particularly in the current climate of stress, about how huge and how persuasive the tech organizations are, we believe we can get enough individuals who state ‘I simply need a basic alternative, a service that I can use. Moreover, with no more stress over data protection”, Ramaswamy added.