Challenging The Google Way In Search

In 1997, the two future founders of Google wrote in their research paper, "The Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" that search had a bright future, and was proven to be accurate! Google's search engine has powered their immense continuing success, project after project.

The runaway project success made $100 billion in 2020, from search business alone, while potential competitors sprung up. Neeva, an ad-free search engine that requires a subscription, is attracting the interest of investors, with a "private, ad-free search experience with only real results". Pay just $4.95 per month and search whatever you want without any advertisements.?

Two ex-employees of Google are building Neeva - S Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan - both IIT (Indian Institute Of Technology) alumni and both from the early days of Google and YouTube. Both saw an opportunity in a business that is today completely dominated by Google because advertisements are quite distracting and have dangerous side - effects too.?

When the internet started growing rapidly in the 1990s, the question was: how to navigate it fruitfully? Yahoo came up with a portal containing information arranged topic-wise, and Inktomi and Alta Vista made primary search engines. Google offered search based on web-page ranking, based on links to those pages, and supported the business by advertising.

The founders of Neeva state that it is a social experiment as well as a technical one, and is based on a subscription model. But the question is: If there was a great product that assisted you in several ways, would you want it free with advertisements or pay for it without ads? The initial price would be higher, and then would be reduced over time as efficiency grows. Others like Brave Browsers and DuckDuckGo have done similar things too.?

DuckDuckGo as an app has grown pretty fast and has become the Number#2 search engine in many countries, on mobile phones namely the United States, Canada, Australia, etc. It doesn't know the number of users as it doesn't track them! But based on the number of downloads and surveys it is estimated that the number of users is around 7 to 10 crore.

Google in its initial years worked on building new features like news, shopping, videos, maps, and so on. Privacy later emerged as an important competitive element across several categories. Today it is not just about search, but also consuming information in a certain context.?

Neeva has indexed billions of web - pages like the others have done, and is crediting Apple, Google, Bing, Yelp, etc. for providing the information!

This is by far the most direct challenge Google has to face, and the question remains, whether people will pay for search or not is the trillion-dollar question.

- Aindri Abhishek Singh