‘Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor-quality search results,” states a 1998 research paper published by Stanford University.
That statement would not be so remarkable if it had not been written by two students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who used the paper to introduce Google; the largest and most profitable advertising machine the internet would ever host.
Page and Brin are not the only engineers at Google to have had a change of heart. Now, Sridhar Ramaswamy, an executive who helped grow the search giant’s advertising arm into the $168bn (£120bn) business it is today, is turning his back on the group.
“I was not happy with how the ecosystem turned out,” says Ramaswamy, who left Google in 2018. “I know there is a certain irony in that I was part of creating that system … but I am looking for a clean set of principles.”
Sridhar Ramaswamy has launched a subscription based, ad-free search engine in an attempt to compete with Google
Ramaswamy has launched Neeva, a rival search engine which will charge users a subscription fee of no more than $10 per month in exchange for ad-free results.
The engine, a collection of sounds “that are fun to say” and an ode to Google, has received $77.5m in funding from blue-chip Silicon Valley investors Greylock and Sequoia, and has a valuation of more than $300m.
Several former Google and Facebook employees, including search engine and Chrome browser chiefs, have jumped ship to join it.
Neeva currently consists of odd parts licensed from Microsoft Bing, Google, and weather and stock data services. The goal is to use Neeva employees’ technical prowess to create a deeply personal search engine that can trawl through Dropbox folders, emails and other files in smartphones and laptops to provide the most relevant information to its customers.
Google search | How it decides what you see
The free model consumers have become accustomed to has proliferated thanks to a commercial strategy championed by Silicon Valley. But the bargain these companies are striking with users is beginning to appear increasingly one-sided.
Whether a well-funded yet small player like Neeva can make a dent in Google’s market share is up for debate.
Google has held between 89pc and 93pc of the UK’s search market and holds around 90pc globally, despite the existence of smaller players who offer privacy-focused services.
“We investigated the subscription model a few years ago,” says Christian Kroll, chief executive of Ecosia, a privacy-focused search engine that plants trees with its advertising profits.
Google privacy tools
“We found people wouldn’t be really willing to pay, so I’m a bit sceptical.” Kroll thinks the idea of users paying to see different results when they search “separates people into two classes”.
Gabriel Weinberg, chief executive of DuckDuckGo, warns: “Offering private search for a price makes it only accessible to the privileged. We believe everyone should have free access to simple privacy protection online, period.” It is the data profiling and subsequent targeting which Facebook and Google offer that Weinberg takes issue with.
Vivek Raghunathan, the Neeva co-founder, who ran YouTube’s monetisation before leaving in 2019, says it is “premature” to worry about the internet splitting into two unequal parts. The value of advertisers versus users is what sowed the seed of his departure after 12 years.
Neeva co-founder Vivek Raghunathan
Before joining YouTube, he worked on Google Assistant, where he “whet his appetite” with experiments for services like warning people to leave for their flight, or that a package would be arriving in 30 minutes, made possible by gathering information from their Gmail inbox.
But when that data was being used to target people with adverts, he says: “I had this nagging feeling that conversations about trading off user value for advertising value were missing a piece of the puzzle.”
Ramaswamy, who oversaw the controversial Google Shopping feature, says advertising not only erodes privacy but the quality of a service. And commercial partnerships, including payments to appear by certain keywords, were beginning to undermine the quality of search results.
Google share of digital ads in UK
“The free model is trying to please multiple stakeholders: advertisers, content creators on YouTube and consumers,” he says. “Ads often influence search results. And often, it is difficult for a consumer to distinguish between paid and organic search results. This is rarely in the best interest of the consumer.”
Raghunathan adds: “Success for us would mean adding value to people’s lives.”
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