“Sridhar and Vivek, with their depth of knowledge on everything from technology to what people actually need and do, are probably the only people in the world where I would go, ‘Okay, I’ll go on this journey with you, because you know how to go on this journey,'” says Greylock partner and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. Whatever the answer to that question, Neeva’s creators understand what they’re getting into. “It’s looking for the answer to the question, ‘If there was a high-quality product that clearly benefits you in multiple ways, would you pay for it as opposed to having it be free, supported by ads?'” “I tell people that Neeva is as much a social experiment as it is a technological experiment,” says Ramaswamy, the company’s CEO. Sridhar Ramaswamy At its highest level, Neeva represents a bet that the way Google monetizes search and other services through advertising-as it’s done for more than two decades to wildly profitable effect-has hampered its user experience, thereby opening up an opportunity. They’ve also secured $77.5 million in funding, including investments from venture-capital titans Greylock and Sequoia. Moreover, about 30 percent of the roughly 60-person staff they’ve assembled at Neeva consists of ex-Googlers, including Hall-of-Famers such as Udi Manber (a former head of Google search) and Darin Fisher (one of the inventors of Chrome). Two long-time Google executives with more than a quarter-century of experience at the web giant between them, they have an insider’s understanding of how it operates. Neeva may have a certain whiff of improbability about it, but its cofounders, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, are the furthest thing from naïfs. Apps for iPhones and iPads, and browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Brave, are part of the deal. It’s free for three months-long enough for users to grow accustomed to it without obligation-and $4.95 a month thereafter. Though it’s extremely similar to Google in many respects-with a few twists of its own-it dumps the web giant’s venerable ad-based business model in the interest of avoiding distractions, privacy quandaries, and other compromises.
WOLFRAMALPHA SUCHMASCHINE FOR FREE
And we’ve been accustomed to getting our search for free since well before there was a Google-which might make paying for it sound like being expected to purchase a phone book.īut Neeva is indeed a new search engine, officially launching today, that carries a subscription fee.
By definition, any new search engine competes with Google, whose 90 percent-plus market share leaves little oxygen for other players. At first blush, it may seem like a textbook example of a startup idea destined never to get anywhere.
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