A Former Google Executive Takes Aim at His Old Company With a Start-Up (nytimes.com) 48
Sridhar Ramaswamy once ran Google's $115 billion advertising arm. But he grew disillusioned and worried that growth was too much of a priority. From a report: Nearly two years after he left Google, he is testing his newfound conviction by mounting a challenge against his former employer. His new company, Neeva, is a search engine that looks for information on the web as well as personal files like emails and other documents. It will not show any advertisements and it will not collect or profit from user data, he said. It plans to make money on subscriptions from users paying for the service. As evidenced by the antitrust investigations into Google's businesses, challenging the company is no easy task. Google accounts for roughly 90 percent of all searches globally and competitors have tried unsuccessfully for years to make inroads. Neeva faces the additional hurdle of getting people to pay for something that many have come to expect as free. While there is a growing awareness that free services from Google and Facebook come at the expense of personal data, many consumers -- even those who express a concern about their privacy -- are often unwilling to pay for an alternative.
Neeva recalls a notion raised, ironically, by the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in a 1998 research paper when they were doctoral students at Stanford University. They wrote, at the time, that "advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results." Search advertising has become much more sophisticated since the 1990s, but much of the same "conflicts of interest" remains, according to Mr. Ramaswamy. Companies are often torn between serving the interests of advertisers or the interests of users. He pointed to how Google has devoted more space to ads at the top of search results with the results users are seeking pushed down the page -- an issue more pronounced on smaller smartphone screens. "It's a slow drift away from what is the best answer for the user and how do we surface it," he said. "As a consumer product, the more pressure there is to show ads, the less useful in the long term the product becomes."
Neeva recalls a notion raised, ironically, by the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in a 1998 research paper when they were doctoral students at Stanford University. They wrote, at the time, that "advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results." Search advertising has become much more sophisticated since the 1990s, but much of the same "conflicts of interest" remains, according to Mr. Ramaswamy. Companies are often torn between serving the interests of advertisers or the interests of users. He pointed to how Google has devoted more space to ads at the top of search results with the results users are seeking pushed down the page -- an issue more pronounced on smaller smartphone screens. "It's a slow drift away from what is the best answer for the user and how do we surface it," he said. "As a consumer product, the more pressure there is to show ads, the less useful in the long term the product becomes."
Clarification (Score:3)
Nearly two years after he left Google, he is testing his newfound conviction by mounting a challenge against his former employer.
That conviction being "money", or soon to be "money".
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Probably we'd disagree on definitions, but on the upside, indentifies-as chimps are self eliminating.
Wait. What? (Score:2)
looks for information on the web as well as personal files like emails and other documents
Either that is a poorly written statement, or this search engine will be reading and categorizing your emails and documents for everyone to see. No way would I ever use something like that, let alone pay for it.
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Either that is a poorly written statement, or this search engine will be reading and categorizing your emails and documents for everyone to see.
It indexes the documents on your computer, but only you can see the results. This is similar to what Spotlight does on MacOS, or Wox on Windows.
Re:Wait. What? (Score:5, Informative)
In other words, he is going to duplicate existing products that nobody gives a shit about.
I have a MacBook and I have Spotlight disabled. It is not very useful and the indexing kills my battery. Spotlight's overall value to me is less than zero.
But Spotlight is very poorly implemented. It seems to re-index everything every day and it tries to index inserted removable media such as thumb drives and backup disks, which is almost never what you want. You wonder why your backup is taking hours instead of minutes only to realize that the seek head is thrashing back-and-forth while the backup software and the indexing software are conflicting.
If it worked better, I may leave it enabled, but I certainly wouldn't pay for it.
My prediction is that Neeva is going to fail. Go to neeva.com and you will see ... nothing. There is no product yet. My experience is that companies that start doing publicity and press interviews before they have a product or service ready to sell always fail.
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You can add /Volumes to the ignore path to disable indexing of external drives. I've never noticed a full-blown reindex unless I'm upgrading the OS, although I haven't really been checking for it, so I'll concede that it's not unfathomable.
Spotlight is (to me) most useful for quickly launch apps using the keyboard shortcut Command+Space, and typing the first few letters, or for doing quick math without launching a calculator. I actually prefer using spotlight for math in most cases because I can easily ed
the genie is out of the bottle (Score:2)
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Lexis/Nexis is an example of a specialized case, but its idea is one that could be expanded into other spheres.
I'd happily pay for a search engine if it's good and protects my privacy. I won't pay Lexis/Nexis prices, but I think there's plenty of room below that tier.
Re: the genie is out of the bottle (Score:1)
Re: the genie is out of the bottle (Score:2)
but duckduckgo cant customize content because it is so private. You cant use these services that treat users like agricultural products for business, your business docs stored in the cloud are just eggs you laid for them to harvest and sell. If we are the source of income all that changes.
Re: the genie is out of the bottle (Score:1)
You'd get way better results by using searx. I used to use DDG too but they have gotten worse especially after not having Wolfram|Alfa API access.
At this point (Score:2)
I'm fed up enough with Google that I'd actually pay a company money to provide me with a search engine of Google's quality around 2005, without ads and without tracking. That would be worth 10 bucks a month to me easily.
Say, does anybody know how much money Google makes off of each one of us?
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Sundar Pichai
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Say, does anybody know how much money Google makes off of each one of us?
Google's net profit for 2019 was $34B.
They have about 2 billion users.
So $17 per person per year.
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So if I'm willing to pay 30, would that incentivize anyone?
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So if I'm willing to pay 30, would that incentivize anyone?
No.
You are part of a very, very small minority. The vast majority of people are cheap fucks who don't want to pay for anything.
Re:At this point (Score:5, Informative)
So if I'm willing to pay 30, would that incentivize anyone?
No. $17 is the profit. You would need to replace the revenue.
Google's revenue was $160B last year, or about $80 per user.
Very few people would be willing to pay that much. If you ask people if they care about tracking and privacy, large percentages will say "Yes". But if you look at actual behavior, it is clear that very few people care enough to pay or even change their behavior.
I am mostly happy with Google and I would not pay for an alternative even if it was as good (it won't be).
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Ads cost time, so it's more that most value their time less than their money. This may or may not be an accurate assessment.
Desktop search? (Score:1)
I'm glad it's 2003 and the height of desktop search startups.
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Re:Desktop search? (Score:4, Informative)
Honestly, I wish him luck. I'd rather work for a failed startup with good well-meaning people, than for a large shitty company. I can prepare my resume easily enough, I can't shake off meaningless drudgery quite so easily.
Why a single business model? (Score:2)
Why do many companies insist on a single business model?
Wikipedia is an example. They have a huge ad on every page requesting donations but refuse to allow advertising.
I would much rather opt in to a small ad on Wikipedia than pay for it each month.
Duckduckgo is another example. They are privacy focused and it would seem to make perfect sense for
them to offer an ad-free option for a fee but they don't.
Same with this search engine. Why not give people the option of either non-tracking ads or a monthly sub
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Complexity.
Every business model, costs the company a lot of money and people to implement.
For a Wikipedia they are mostly a Not for Profit. However their goal is to provide factual information. Having Advertising could make people double think the validity of its content if they are companies giving them a lot of money.
Say Apple is having ads on its site, that pays a good portion of these peoples revenues. With a lot of Apple adds would articles like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. be fair?
A lot of th
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Disabling ads for payers is trivial to implement, as evidenced by nearly every mobile app. The problem is that it's not particularly effective at converting non-paying users to paying users.
Understatement (Score:2)
Neeva faces the additional hurdle of getting people to pay for something that many have come to expect as free. While there is a growing awareness that free services from Google and Facebook come at the expense of personal data, many consumers -- even those who express a concern about their privacy -- are often unwilling to pay for an alternative.
Unwilling to pay, you say. It's worse than that. Microsoft has been literally paying people to use Bing for years now, and still nobody uses it.
Google will remain vastly dominant until they decline far enough that some other search engine can serve its users considerably better than Google does. Not slightly better. That's not enough. Considerably better. At its height, this was impossible. Google was too good. But Google search results have been declining for years, and have gotten considerably wor
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We have the AltaVista to Google migration and the MySpace to Facebook migration to show us what happens when the value proposition for users inverts. Don't think it can't happen to Google.
Yes, it's true that people switched from AltaVista to Google because Google was better at the time. But things are not the same now.
Since the Google vs AltaVista days, Google has built an advertising business that brings in $125 Billion a year. $125 Billion buys you *A LOT* of computers in *A LOT* of really big data centers.
Do a search for "Google search results suck" and you will find complaints about Google's search results going back 15 years. And yet Google has no meaningful competition today.
You'
Sounds pretty "Cuil" (Score:1)
Advertising is immoral (Score:3)
Not only that, but malware is sometimes served in ads, so it's a practical imperative to block them as well.
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There's something ironic about someone complaining about clickbait with a "Bob Marley for president!" signature... :)
Re: Advertising is immoral (Score:2)
Not even up and they collect data on you...wth ! (Score:4, Interesting)
So I was intrigued, went to their website which doesn't load unless you run their javascript libraries, including one that gathers all your metrics. They ask for an email address for their "waitlist" and then send you immediately to a "tell us all about yourself so we can decide if you're a good fit for us".
For a guy who claims "It will not show any advertisements and it will not collect or profit from user data, he said." they sure are collecting a lot of private user data without even having the system running yet.
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Well, technically, the more they know about you, the better your search results. After all, if you're a developer, chances are when you search you'd want more developer-oriented pages and API info as that would be more relevant to you than other topics.
Not selling your data is not the same as not collecting it to make the results more relevant to you, after all.
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Except they very explicitly state:
[Neeva] will not collect or profit from user data
That's not "and" profit, that's "or" profit. They are saying they do NOT collect user data, yet they do. If you're going to collect user data, don't claim the opposite. It's an immediate ethical red flag.
The selling point for this service is the privacy aspect, and they've already blown that. Collecting user data is just too tempting for even this guy to resist.
Privacy conscious netizens will stick with services like DuckDuckGo.com
lazy search (Score:3)
Missing the point (Score:2)
While there is a growing awareness that free services from Google and Facebook come at the expense of personal data, many consumers -- even those who express a concern about their privacy -- are often unwilling to pay for an alternative.
This is really missing the point and the problem. Chalking it up to costing us our privacy is not even the tip of the iceberg. That is like saying global warming is a problem because people will have to buy air conditioners.
Nobody really is bothered any more by receiving ads that are tailored to their interests.
But the amount of data that google gathers up, not just private data but behavioral data, allows google to not just know what we like but to help other companies manipulate what we like and what we d
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