As more people learn about the dark side of the Internet, more of them are searching for ways to protect their privacy online. And so, we see the constant rise of VPNs and services that compete with the offerings from the likes of Google.
To that end, we have seen a few privacy-focused search engines launching in recent years, including DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, You.com and private.sh.
Last year, Neeva joined this group and had already managed to get 600,000 users in the US. And now, this advert- and tracker-free search engine is bringing its service to the UK, France and Germany.
What makes Neeva special is that it is the brainchild of Sridhar Ramaswamy, who worked at Google for 16 years and ran its ad business. While there, he saw firsthand how the technology sector had become “exploitative” of people’s data, something he no longer wanted to be a part of.
And so he used his knowledge and connections to launch his own search engine and has even managed to raise $77.5m from investors to make that happen.
Today, Neeva is more than a search engine, it also offers other services for a fee; these would include a password manager and a VPN. In the UK, access to these services was likely to be about £5 per month, and we presume the same amount of euros would be asked in Germany and France.
“We felt the traditional search engines had become about advertising and advertisers – and not really about serving users,” Mr Ramaswamy told BBC. “Google has a dominant position in the marketplace – and the incentive for them to truly innovate, to truly create disruptive experiences, is not really there… And then also as a company, they feel obligated to show more and more revenue and profit to their shareholders, so they just keep increasing the number of ads.”
When testing out Neeva, we saw fewer ads without anyone pushing us to either visit a place (there are no maps yet) or to sign-up for anything — let alone buy something.
Like that’s the case with Google, Wikipedia’s entries are at the top of search results, which is ok with me.
In addition to its website, Neeva also offers a Chrome browser extension that will neatly list all the trackers installed on web pages visited. Trying it out will paint a gloomy picture though, with pretty much all websites we’ve visited hosting a ton of trackers.
To make things slightly worse, most websites have some code belonging to Google, which would be Google Analytics (or Google Tag Manager). Also, many have the Facebook Pixel code, which is used for tracking ad performance with Facebook ads.
It is, however, unclear whether Neeva has a fighting chance in this market — and this is also true for pretty much all Google rivals. I guess Microsoft’s Bing has some chance as it is the default search engine in Windows, but even that helped it make a tiny, tiny dent in Google’s (dominant) market share.
We at VPNreports like healthy competition and can only hope some of you guys and gals would embrace products such as Neeva. And also use a VPN, to make it at least a bit harder for data-hungry companies to suck in our data. Good luck!