Neeva, an ad and tracker-free search engine, will launch in the United Kingdom, France and Germany on Thursday, extending its reach after launching in the United States last year.
Neeva, which has raised $77.5 million in funding from investors, offers a free search, with other features such as password-manager access and virtual-private-network (VPN) service based on subscription.
Neeva, a subscription search engine, announced that it has over 600,000 users, the vast majority of whom have a free subscription plan in its domestic U.S. market, and that it will offer UK prices for around £5 ($5.69) per month.
The creator of Neeva, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who worked for Google for 16 years and ran its advertising business, is now campaigning against the exploitative nature of the technology sector, which uses trackers to share information about online activity, especially to display advertising.
He believes that traditional search engines care more about advertising and advertisers than serving users, and he no longer wants to be a part of it.
Neeva’s Chrome browser extension is not only ad-free and tracker-free, but also lists the trackers on the websites visited without displaying ads around the editorial content, which shows that Google receives anonymized information about users who visit pages.
Neeva is available on Android and iOS as a mobile app, as well as on the desktop as a browser extension that blocks trackers and provides Neeva’s own brand of organic search.
The sources for this piece include an article in BBC.
