Jun 4, 2021 9:00 AM

A Google Alum Wants to Make Search Pure Again

Plus: A lesson in macro Googlenomics, an audio jamming dream, and high-stakes cheesesteaks.

Hey, everyone. Originally we were going to call this newsletter From the Desk of Steven J. Levy and publish it like a blog. For some reason, this week we feel vindicated.

The Plain View

Sridhar Ramaswamy spent 15 years heading Google’s ad product team. So it’s telling, if not damning, to note the business idea that Ramaswamy pursued when he left Google in 2018: an ad-free, privacy-centric search engine.

Ramaswamy was an eyewitness and, he admits, a participant in a process that helped create our current online business world, which uses personal data to target consumers. When he joined Google, its revenue driver was AdWords, a platform that delivered non-intrusive, useful ads beside organic results. The ads were sold solely on the basis of relevance to the search queries, not the personal information of the user. Google fixed the instant auction so that “good” ads—ones more relevant to the queries—got an advantage in the bidding process.

But as Google grew, the purity of that arrangement got murkier. Perhaps the turning point was the 2007 purchase of the ad-tech company DoubleClick, which provided technology to serve ads not just within search but all over the web, targeted to user identity rather than their explicit search intent. “Advertising, a $500 billion–plus industry, was moving online, and DoubleClick was the operating system of advertising beyond Google. Why would we not want to own that?” says Ramaswamy, who admits he was on board with the acquisition. Despite Google’s vows to keep the two systems separate, it eventually merged their information, and Google’s once-fanatical devotion to the user came into question. (It’s now the focus of an antitrust investigation too.) “Google severely underestimated the fact that it now owed allegiance to a new set of parties,” says Ramaswamy. “Google now is supposed to serve users like you and me, it is supposed to serve advertisers, and publishers, and the ad-tech industry, and of course itself. You know what? You can't be married to all of these parties and somehow be a faithful spouse to them.”

Like Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Google’s current head of ads and search, Prabhakar Raghavan, Ramaswamy attended the Indian Institute of Technology and got an advanced degree in the US. When he first came to Google in 2003, around the same time as Pichai and Raghavan, his ad team was relatively small. Now the company has many more people working on the ad product than in search. Ramaswamy saw how the advertising mindset affected Google’s priorities—not just in the search engine (where more real estate was devoted to ads) but in ad-supported YouTube as well. The consequences degraded the experience, sometimes with alarming consequences. “You could no longer just watch a video about mountain biking,” he says, using a less explosive example than politics. “YouTube would promptly recommend the best mountain biker that there ever was jumping off of the tallest mountain in the world. It pushed you towards that, because those are the kinds of things that kept attention going. So we had a lot of problems with content on YouTube. It left a bad taste in my mouth.”

His post-Google remedy is Neeva, which he cofounded with former colleagues. His impetus was not reparations, but a belief that people want an alternative to the market leader. In case you miss the point, when you open Neeva, the type-over text in the search field displays slogans like “No ads here,” “Privacy, guaranteed,” and “You are not the product.”

That’s because Neeva really is the product—it makes its money from a subscription fee. (In its current beta phase that’s $5 a month, after a three-month free trial.) No ads, no affiliate fees, no internal applications it’s promoting. For that five bucks, Neeva is the user’s faithful spouse.

Neeva’s search engine is stitched together with third-party technology. The bulk of its links come from Bing, but if you type in “restaurants near me,” the map that displays the results comes from Google. When you search for a product or a travel destination, it makes an effort to up-rank reliable reviews, not overload you with middle-man sites trying to take a cut.

Neeva's search engine has no ads, no affiliate fees, and no internal applications it’s promoting.

Courtesy of Neeva

Neeva also has different ideas about the relationship between search engines and content providers. Giants like Facebook and Google have long resisted the concept of paying newspapers and information services they link to or include in feeds, but Neeva is willing to share income with partners. This week the company announced arrangements with two niche content providers, Quora and Medium. Neeva will kick a fifth of its overall gross revenues back to such partners. (I should disclose that as a former Medium employee, I hold some shares of that resolutely illiquid nine-year-old startup.)

Critics of Big Tech have long argued that ad-supported behemoths would better serve users with ad-free versions that we pay for directly; Neeva has now created a put-up-or-shut moment for users. Ramaswamy admits that winning customers beyond the limited universe of privacy fanatics will be a hard slog. “I think of going from 1 million subscribers to 10 million as a far easier problem than the 0 to 1,” he says. (There is also the fact that another search engine, DuckDuckGo, is marketing itself as a privacy product, though it’s not subscription based.) He suggests that Neeva might eventually reach a part of a larger audience by being bundled with other products. Essentially, though, his bet is that a search engine supported directly by users will be free to create a better experience worth paying for.

“I think people will remember this as the decade where tech got spoken of in the same sentence as plastics and petroleum,” he says. “So I think a company that is militantly for you will stand up. People are open to it.”

The test is whether they will open their wallets for it.

Time Travel

In 2009 I wrote about Googlenomics, telling the origin story of its wildly successful search ads:

Google's ads were always plain blocks of text relevant to the search query. But at first, there were two kinds. Ads at the top of the page were sold the old-fashioned way, by a crew of human beings headquartered largely in New York City. Salespeople wooed big customers over dinner, explaining what keywords meant and what the prices were. Advertisers were then billed by the number of user views, or impressions, regardless of whether anyone clicked on the ad. Down the right side were other ads that smaller businesses could buy directly online. The first of these, for live mail-order lobsters, was sold in 2000, just minutes after Google deployed a link reading “See your ad here.”

But as the business grew, [Salar] Kamangar and [Eric] Veach decided to price the slots on the side of the page by means of an auction. Not an eBay-style auction that unfolds over days or minutes as bids are raised or abandoned, but a huge marketplace of virtual auctions in which sealed bids are submitted in advance and winners are determined algorithmically in fractions of a second. Google hoped that millions of small and medium companies would take part in the market, so it was essential that the process be self-service. Advertisers bid on search terms, or keywords, but instead of bidding on the price per impression, they were bidding on a price they were willing to pay each time a user clicked on the ad. (The bid would be accompanied by a budget of how many clicks the advertiser was willing to pay for.) The new system was called AdWords Select, while the ads at the top of the page, with prices still set by humans, were renamed AdWords Premium.

One key innovation was that all the sidebar slots on the results page were sold off in a single auction. (Compare that to an early pioneer of auction-driven search ads, Overture, which held a separate auction for each slot.) The problem with an all-at-once auction, however, was that advertisers might be inclined to lowball their bids to avoid the sucker's trap of paying a huge amount more than the guy just below them on the page. So the Googlers decided that the winner of each auction would pay the amount (plus a penny) of the bid from the advertiser with the next-highest offer. (If Joe bids $10, Alice bids $9, and Sue bids $6, Joe gets the top slot and pays $9.01. Alice gets the next slot for $6.01, and so on.) Since competitors didn't have to worry about costly overbidding errors, the paradoxical result was that it encouraged higher bids.

Ask Me One Thing

Cheryl asks, “Is there an audio jamming unit that would enable me to have a private conversation outdoors and could counteract the current new ‘doorbells’? I know that stolen packages are supposedly the purpose of the videotaping, but I really would like to enjoy private conversations on my patio with friends, perhaps even in my own home if it's a nice day and my windows are open! The jammer would need to be small and light, so I can carry it with me to friends’ patios or to my daughter’s row house neighborhood, or to the park if I want to have a picnic with my children. You can see how many uses it would have. My guess is that I’m not the only person who values their privacy but lives in a multifamily building or crowded neighborhood.”

Cheryl, I have bad news for you. While it sounds idyllic to cruise your neighborhood and hang in the park with a personal jamming device, it is in fact illegal. Even though legislators in 1934 did not anticipate Ring doorbells, the Communications Act they passed that year specifically outlaws signal jammers. Penalties include fines and imprisonment. You do have a legitimate complaint, though. Our phones, smart speakers, and automobiles are increasingly becoming listening devices, with one ear constantly open for the next call to Alexa, Google, or Siri. Though Amazon, Apple, and other companies assure us they are not surveilling us, mistakes happen. And once a pervasive blanket of vigilant microphones is in place, who can say that an authoritarian regime might not take it over to monitor everything we say? Cheryl, I think you’re OK outdoors for now, and when you’re visiting friends and neighbors, you can ask them to turn the devices off. Any future protections might depend on a revised Communications Act.

You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.

End Times Chronicle

A South Jersey deli’s stock price (weird in itself) rose to $113 million. I’ve got to try one of those cheesesteaks.

Last but Not Least

I felt like I won the lottery when I got the vaccine. But science confirms that some people need an actual lottery to incentivize the jab.

The pandemic has convinced a lot of families to homeschool even after vaccination. No hall passes required!

Microsoft is now making voting software. Because Windows is so secure?

A dispatch from the front lines on Silicon Valley’s (eggless) Mayonnaise Wars. As long as they don’t put it on pastrami.

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