Inspired in 15: The Future of Search with Sridhar Ramaswamy of Neeva
Inspired Capital
Generalist fund, leading early stage rounds with checks ranging from $500K-$20M.
On our podcast, Inspired in 15, we dive into big ideas with the smartest founders and operators we know. In episode three, Alexa von Tobel sat down with Sridhar Ramaswamy of Neeva to talk all about search. Sridhar started Neeva in 2019 as the world’s first ad-free, private subscription search engine. He brings with him 15 years of experience as SVP of Google’s $100B ads and commerce business.
Today, Google dominates search with 92% of the market, but there are others, from Bing to DuckDuckGo to Neeva, working to capture users as well. Sridhar shares why he thinks there’s still room for innovation in the category.
Three of our favorite takeaways from Sridhar:
1: Web3 is unlocking new relationships with publishers. According to Sridhar, ad-supported content and prioritizing paid results can no longer scale. The rise of Web3 has opened up new ways for search engines to compensate publishers. Rev-share agreements can leverage crypto to meter out payments (for less than a penny) based on user engagement.
“It's becoming quite clear to most publishers that ad-supported publishing is not a winning construct. It's not going to keep them in business, because it drives this relentless race to the bottom in terms of bad content…We really see much more of a symbiotic relationship between a search engine for customers, and great content creators.”?
2: Voice search alone is not the entirety of search’s future. While more and more consumers have access to voice search capabilities, it has not taken over as the singular way people seek information. In fact, much of its functionality is limited when it comes to complex questions beyond “How many tablespoons are in a cup?”
“I see [voice search] as a natural complement to what we think of as search, rather than a complete replacement platform. And I think the advances in technology for voice recognition have been pretty astounding over the past five years. So I do really see much more of a smooth continuum between input text based search and voice search.”
3: Advancements in AI have lowered the barrier to entry for new search players. Some of the technology that allowed giants like Google and Microsoft to parse information and better understand user queries has now been made much more widely available through AI—without scores of internal engineering teams.
“What is really cool about these very large AI models that are being developed is that it’s democratizing [search] technology. More and more people have access to what are pages about, what are the concepts that are there, being able to summarize pages very effectively. So we are liberal users of machine learning and AI within Neeva. We see it as a powerful enabling technology that in some sense has lowered the cost of us being a search player.”