"By the end of his 15 years at Google, Sridhar Ramaswamy, then the executive in charge of the company’s $115 billion advertising arm, had grown disillusioned with the business he had helped build.
The relentless pressure to maintain Google’s growth, he said, had come at a heavy cost to the company’s users. Useful search results were pushed down the page to squeeze in more advertisements, and privacy was sacrificed for online tracking tools to keep tabs on what ads people were seeing.
The final straw came in November 2017 when news reports found videos of scantily clad children on YouTube featuring ads from Deutsche Bank, Amazon, eBay and Adidas. The advertisements were served automatically by the technology systems overseen by Mr. Ramaswamy’s team.
“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."
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