Building a Better Search Engine: Lessons From Neeva’s CEO

After helping to develop Google’s marketing business for over 15 years, Sridhar Ramaswamy started out to experience Google’s dependence on commercials turned into restricting the quality of search effects.

decided to prove he could attain a higher search revel in without commercials, Ramaswamy co-founded and released Neeva in 2019.

as the CEO of his own search organisation, Ramaswamy is accountable to the customers of his product who pay a month-to-month subscription to access Neeva.

“No commercials” method Neeva doesn’t have an incentive to gather information on its users, making it the best search engine on the market that’s both advert-loose with a privateness alternative.

Ramaswamy is presently at the conference circuit raising awareness about Neeva, and we controlled to capture up with him at Collision closing week in Toronto.

We profiled Neeva once earlier than and welcomed Ramaswamy as a visitor on the seek Engine journal show in December.

but, each time we most effective scratched the surface. Now, we want to dig deeper.

So, what makes Neeva exclusive from the other corporations — and what makes Neeva a feasible opportunity to Google and Bing?

What Are Neeva’s middle Values?

Many groups enter the market making lofty claims of how they’ll do proper via customers. Even Google once had “don’t be evil” written into its code of conduct: a promise to which a few critics argue it hasn’t lived up. Google has de-emphasized “Don’t be evil” in its code of behavior, although it become never removed.

In 2021, Google changed into sued via three former personnel over its “Don’t be evil” motto. They allege that failure to live up to the motto is the equal of a breach of contract.

To higher apprehend how Neeva will preserve delivering a product that puts customers’ desires first, I requested Ramaswamy what Neeva’s core values are.

“It’s now not some thing we’ve got posted, however that is some thing I’ve mentioned plenty with Vivek [Raghunathan, co-founder of Neeva], and i feel accurate approximately pronouncing it,” Ramaswamy started. “At our middle, we suppose that, as a agency, we need to make generation serve humans.”

“I suppose many different technology organizations, particularly inside the remaining 25, have turned alternatively exploitative,” he persevered. “I think the advert model exemplifies this. Basically, if i will persuade you and get you addicted to my product, i can quite a good deal do some thing.”

“It’s generation Serving human beings”

Make no mistake: Neeva is a for-income corporation, even though Ramaswamy says its subscription-based totally sales model is designed to serve humans instead of advertisers.

“yes, agencies are for-profit, however I think if you installation your values to be aligned with your user, to be aligned with your purchaser, you’ll constantly serve them,” he said. “To me, that part is vital. In case you had to mention, ‘good day, what exemplifies what you do?’ It’s era serving humans. That is why we do things like provide a flat rate for the search application you get from us.”

“generation At Scale Is pretty inexpensive”

Many agencies inside the zone lead clients to agree with scaling era is costly, which is how some justify charging higher expenses, as an instance, as they develop.

It doesn’t need to be that manner, Ramaswamy says, as he believes the cost of technology at scale is overblown.

“It’s our notion that technology at scale is virtually pretty cheaper,” he referred to. “That’s the magic of era, but right now, the manner all of these businesses are structured — as they scale, they squeeze more money from you.”

“It’s no longer like you’re getting extra fee, though glaringly there are exceptions,” Ramaswamy persevered. “but it’s truely back to the fundamentals of ways you create merchandise that pride people. And to me, that’s an honorable living.”

What Does Neeva Do To ‘Serve people’?

Neeva’s definition of ‘generation serving humans’ is exemplified via its comments gadget.

more or less 20% of the Neeva group is tasked totally with taking note of customer comments and using it to form the product experience.

on the other hand, many criticize Google for no longer giving customers what they need out of a search revel in.

I asked Ramaswamy if he ought to provide examples of precise customer comments that helped shape Neeva into what it’s miles today.

“There’s heaps of feedback that involves us. From time to time we experience bad approximately now not being about to take care of all of it,” he began. “however to present an example: We did a forex converter because, agree with it or no longer, it turned into a top request. First of all, I did now not apprehend this comments. I was like, ‘without a doubt? It’s that tough with a view to click on on a hyperlink and then kind in your numbers and get your currency converted?”

“however then,” Ramaswamy stated, “I realized a bigger fact about how human beings reflect onconsideration on the net.”

“humans fear Clicking On hyperlinks”

Neeva became first of all against going the Google route of handing over content material at once in the serps, but has needed to make a few concessions.

via being attentive to consumer feedback, the Neeva team found out there’s a real apprehension closer to clicking on hyperlinks in seek outcomes.

“Clicking on a link has now become an adverse project. Human beings genuinely worry clicking on links because they don’t recognize what’s on the opposite aspect,” Ramaswamy stated. “Is it going to be a pop-up? Is it going to inform you that your computer has a pandemic? Is it something else? That’s the purpose why we placed [a currency converter] proper into the quest engine. So that’s one example.”

some other perk provided to Neeva subscribers is get admission to to a Slack channel in which customers can engage in organization discussions with developers.

“quite a few human beings said, ‘We need so as to provide remarks to [improve] your seek outcomes,’” Ramaswamy said. “So we constructed a community comments feature that’s released to some people; it’s not launched to every person.”

The manner it works, he defined, is customers “can say, ‘good day, this result is not relevant.’ Or, ‘This end result is the top end result for this query.’”

“This list sort of is going on and on,” Ramaswamy said. “clients are absolutely a supply of masses of ideas.”

Neeva Is A consumer-Guided Product

At Collision, Ramaswamy described what he subsequently ambitions to perform with Neeva, and how it differs from the goals of large serps like Google.

After speaking with him, I asked if he should make clear what he intended by way of looking to “let society figure out” what to do with Neeva.

“I spoke about it extra in the spirit of: Google spends one billion, makes one hundred billion. My element become greater: We need to make a couple of billion and allow society discern out what it desires to do with the provider,” Ramaswamy explained. “It’s more of a standard argument round now not captive capitalism, but competitive capitalism.”

“The lovely thing about generation is creating a product for one hundred million humans is not wildly exclusive from creating a product for a thousand million humans,” he continued. “That’s the magic of scale and era.”

Being paid for through the those who use it gives Neeva particular flexibility concerning future growth.

customers don’t have as a lot affect over a product like Google search, thinking about they usually don’t pay to use it.

despite the fact that even for a unfastened product, Ramasamy argues that Google may be doing tons extra to provide users cost.

“My point turned into a patron-paid product makes it an awful lot less complicated for us to launch the product to the entire world [and] nonetheless run a profitable business enterprise, but no longer at the type of obscene scale that I see fb or Google operating,” he said. “humans continually say …  ‘properly, Google offers me free Gmail. Will they stop giving it?’ And my tough solution is: properly, I’m sure, with 100 billion dollars, a bunch of us are going to make without a doubt top selections approximately how to use that money.”

Ramaswamy stated that users “don’t want a monopolist to make that choice and determine they need to present you loose Gmail. We don’t need charity from rich agencies so one can do that; we want opposition, so more of the money this is being spent on this comes to us.”

Will Neeva hold Its privacy guarantees?

DuckDuckGo, another seek engine that touts privacy as its key promoting point, become these days a supply of controversy after it changed into discovered to be passing along a minor quantity of statistics to Microsoft.

That stemmed from the deal DuckDuckGo has to apply Bing’s seek index.

I asked Ramasamy what measures Neeva has in vicinity to preserve its 0 data series promises.

“now not serving advertisements is the most important degree we’ve in area. And, we’re building our personal index,” he said, including that the organization is actively “writing down human ratings and getting facts lower back.”

“We without a doubt want to create a differentiated product,” Ramasamy emphasised. “We commenced with the usage of the Bing API for search [but] in lots of methods, I think we might have been better off investing in seek from day one. We are a product organisation, and we need to end up a far better seek engine. That’s the massive differentiator.”

“We’re Making Foundational Investments In seek”

similarly to preserving Neeva advert-unfastened, it’ll be able to hold its 0-information promise by way of constructing its personal seek index.

DuckDuckGo, as an instance, bumped into problem because it’s wholly depending on Microsoft for seek consequences. Ramasamy says Neeva is the only employer outdoor Google and Bing crawling and indexing the net.

That claim is sponsored up by way of an October 2020 report on virtual opposition with the aid of the residence Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust. The file states:

“The high value of preserving a fresh index, and the decision by way of many huge webpages to dam most crawlers, notably limits new search engine entrants. Today, the best English-language search engines that preserve their very own comprehensive website index are Google and Bing.”

He stated that, in reaction, many ask, “What’s the massive deal? What distinction does it make?”

“It lets us do things like growing a much higher shopping enjoy,” Ramasamy defined, noting that, as an instance, Neeva “released Reddit links in seek consequences … because we work with Reddit to get their index. So we have an index of all of the web pages they’re serving.”

Ramasamy stated that users can acquire higher-exceptional consequences for such queries as, “What are the most interesting Reddit posts that correspond to this question?”

Neeva can “release functions like that, because we’re making foundational investments in seek; quite an awful lot the handiest company outside of Google and Microsoft to be doing this.”

“We more and more use Bing as a fallback while we can’t solution queries,” Ramasamy acknowledged. However, he stated, “over the years, our aspiration is as a way to do increasingly of the search consequences ourselves.”

Neeva’s Sole focus Is conventional internet content (For Now)

With human beings’s seek behavior turning greater in the direction of brief motion pictures, I requested Ramaswamy if Neeva has any plans to index content like net tales or TikTok movies.

For now, Neeva’s sole awareness is to solve search for text-based internet content material.

“solving for seek, specially things like spoken search, is enough of a large trouble that we’ve not pretty long gone there,” Ramaswamy stated. “we’ve running preparations. We have partnerships with agencies like Twitter and corporations like Reddit to better surface their content material.

Twitter, he pointed out, “Has loads of real-time information. So we’re focused on things like that right now and less on video. That would be a fun task to do.”

Neeva’s finest undertaking Is cognizance

As we wrapped up our conversation, I asked Ramaswamy: What’s the most giant hurdle for Neeva to overcome on its journey closer to mass adoption?

Ramaswamy’s solution: “It clearly is set opposition.”

The product, he stated, isn’t the issue.

“We have a exquisite product. Compared to ad-supported options … the unfastened Neeva seek engine is infinitely higher,” Ramaswamy explained. “The place where we battle is getting the phrase out, getting humans to know us as an option, and getting human beings to set us as the default search in Safari, that’s not possible.

“call for greater choice”

As Ramaswamy defined, there’s no incentive for a agency like Google to innovate if it doesn’t have any challengers.

agencies tend to enhance their merchandise while confronted with extra strong competition. However the best way for more competition to go into the search marketplace is for consumers to call for extra options.

“To me, that is the largest ask that i would have,” Ramaswamy stated, “is to demand more choice, due to the fact opposition produces better products.”

In turn, he said, “That opposition creates higher products for us. An incumbent this is doing thoroughly has no incentive to innovate [or] to disrupt.”

Conversely, over at Neeva, “we’ve got not anything to lose,” Ramaswamy informed me. “We’re going to swing for the fences [and make it] simpler for humans to switch, for them to strive Neeva, for them to decide for themselves in the event that they need it or no longer.”

What’s next For Neeva?

before parting ways, I needed to ask what we should anticipate subsequent from Neeva.

“There’s lots I’ve learned from Google My enterprise in terms of nearby agencies – even in terms of search Console – that I feel confident we will do better,” Ramaswamy stated, including that “GMB, as you realize, is a actual hassle for masses of human beings. Mainly corporations that need to replace records for a gaggle of groups that they paintings with.”

The hope, Ramaswamy stated, is that “we’ll have higher equipment. However now not yet.”