A Startup Is Testing the Subscription Model for Search Engines

In November 2017, Sridhar Ramaswamy--the head of Google's $95 billion advertising arm--left the company after a scandal concerning advertisements for major corporations found on YouTube videos that put children in questionable situations. Ramaswamy told The New York Times that shortly after that incident, he decided that he needed to do something different in his life--because "an ad-supported model had limitations." This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. Ramaswamy's startup company, Neeva, is that "something different"--and though it, too, is a search engine, it seeks to sidestep some of Google's problems by avoiding the ads altogether. Ramaswamy says that the new engine won't show ads and won't collect or profit from user data--instead, it will charge its users a subscription fee.