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https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/05/neeva-brings-its-ad-free-search-engine-to-europe/ Neeva has launched in the EU. Neeva is a search engine designed to rival Google, touting it gives web users honest search results, no tracking, and with no advertisements or affiliate links. The incredible part about all this, is it is the brainchild of Sridhar Ramaswamy, who was a Google for 15+ years, with a final position of senior vice president of advertising and commerce – responsible for $28.1B in annual advertising revenue. Really interesting press release from Neeva as it launches in Europe: "Neeva puts users first and gives consumers control to customize their web search experiences. By eschewing ads and advertisers, Neeva eliminates corporate bias that has plagued the traditional search experience. Instead, Neeva's sole goal is to create a search engine that delivers the best results as quickly as possible. Neeva delivers honest results and empowers users to select their information sources such as news outlets, shopping, software engineering sites, travel and others based on personal preference and relevance, rather than what advertisers suggest, all while respecting users’ privacy by blocking third party tracking and never profiting off of user data." Launching under the freemium strategy model, with a premium subscription available that provides additional functionality such as a VPN and a password manager. The premium model rates at $4.95 / month, and Neeva is betting that users are ready to take back ownership of their searches, and of their data. This may be a direct appeal to the hardcore IT specialist or the diehard conspiracy theorist, but also potentially the next generation of interest users who have no profile yet... Neeva’s schtick is that it prioritizes users over advertisers. With the usual Google search, the user is the product, selling you to the companies who seek to compete for the chance to be listed first in your search results. Neeva is banking on the idea that intelligent organic search – rather than ad-gamed searches – will return better results. And – that users will pay for that experience. Google uses cleverly designed algorithms to “personalize” sites/pages/searches to a user. Conversely, Neeva reserves that power and responsibility for the user. Neeva allows preferences such as preferred news sources, small companies vs large companies, “organic”, “sustainable”, etc. Location is blocked by default, and search history is not logged by default. The browser (eg Chrome, Edge, Firefox) extension blocks trackers and uses Neeva’s own search algorithm (on that self-admittedly currently relies heavily on Bing). The result is any site a user visits won’t have any profiling or personalized ads delivered. Will we miss the utility of profiling/personalization? Is it worth the privacy? The most succinct summary of this dream comes from Ramaswamy, the former adman himself, “I just felt like it was an exploitative model, and I saw that the ad platforms Google, Facebook and Amazon were increasingly reaping the benefits of scale. So I wanted to go back to basics and create a product that was about the user.” Really interesting, considering the Googles and Metas of the world were built and fed on the idea that users willingly – freely – threw our data to them for added functionality. What kind of sick person would pay a subscription to get less functionality? (Less functionality that we have to then spend time personalizing and setting preferences for ourselves?) Probably me.