On Thursday, a new search engine without ads and trackers debuts in the UK, France, and Germany.
Neeva was introduced in the US last year and has 600,000 users there.
Creator Sridhar Ramaswamy, who spent 16 years running Google’s ad business, told BBC News that he no longer wanted to be a part of the technology industry because it had become “exploitative” of people’s data.
Trackers exchange data about online behavior, primarily to target advertisements.
Investors have given Neeva $77.5 million (£68 million).
It provides free search but requires membership for other features, including virtual private network (VPN) service and access to password managers.
Users are prompted to register in order to later establish subscriptions.
Additionally, Mr. Ramaswamy estimated that the monthly cost in the UK would be around £5.
We believed that the purpose of traditional search engines had changed from helping users to being about advertising and serving advertisers.
“Google has a dominant position in the market, so there isn’t much of an incentive for them to actually innovate or develop experiences that are disruptive.
The number of adverts merely keeps going up because the corporation feels forced to show its shareholders ever-increasing amounts of revenue and profit.
Utilizing Neeva
Both Google and Neeva’s first page of results when you search for “migraine” provides links to accurate information and news items.
With a brand, the distinction is more obvious.
Both search engines’ results for “BMW” include links to the automaker’s website and Wikipedia entry.
However, Neeva sticks with various BMW official pages while Google continues with a map, social media feeds and links to used car dealers.
Google has a lot more options, but it also overtly encourages me to buy a car.
Neeva’s Chrome browser extension lists the trackers installed on web pages visited.
I tried a few:
the Daily Mail had 351 trackers.
the BBC four, two of which were internal tools
Tesco five
Sainsbury’s 10
parenting forum Mumsnet 27
On the front page of Reddit three
Amazon three – all it’s own
And almost all – but not the BBC – had at least one belonging to Google, meaning Google is receiving anonymized information about users visiting those pages.
There was no advertising displayed around the journalistic material when I had the addon installed.
However, none of Neeva’s other competitors have been able to challenge Google search’s hegemony.
The verbs “to Bing” and “to Duckduckgo,” two other privacy-focused services, are not equivalent to “to google.”
When asked if Mr. Ramaswamy could ever unseat his previous firm, Forrester analyst Steph Liu, who specializes in privacy and search, responded as follows: “In all honesty, no.
“It is comparable to the David and Goliath tale. Google has an excessive number of users and revenue.
The final objective is to provide a different option for customers who are concerned about their privacy, don’t want Google collecting their data, and don’t want advertising to be targeted based on their search history.