“I decided the following month that I needed to do something different with my life,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in a recent interview. “I came to realize that an ad-supported model had limitations.” 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. 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.
A Former Google Executive Takes Aim at His Old Company With a Start-Up by Daisuke Wakabayashi on the NY Times
