Inside The High-Stakes, AI-Powered Race To Dethrone Google Search

In an unassuming office on a quiet, mostly residential street in Mountain View, California -- located eight minutes from Google's sprawling headquarters -- a couple of ex-Googlers and their team of 50 are trying to build a search engine they hope will someday rival their former employer's. The company, Neeva, was started in 2020 by Sridhar Ramaswamy, who ran Google's $162 billion advertising arm before stepping down in 2018, and Vivek Raghunathan, a former Google vice president who worked on monetizing YouTube and other parts of the company. For a few years, the startup, which has raised over $77 million from some of Silicon Valley's top investors, focused on differentiating itself from Google by shunning invasive advertising and allowing power users to pay for extra features. Then, around the end of last year, the team at Neeva watched as a chatbot called ChatGPT created by the San Francisco–based startup OpenAI went viral. ChatGPT's ability to divine answers to nearly every question with an eerily humanlike sentience made it an instant hit, unleashing a modern AI wave. Suddenly, people around the world were talking about replacing Google search with ChatGPT. After all, if a chatbot could instantly answer any question for you, why would you need a search engine that simply spat out a bunch of links for you to trawl through?