Google is facing its first real threat in years

Google was once so dazzlingly brilliant at what it did that it became a verb, and its cherubic founders were the goofy face of Silicon Valley innocence. Today Google isn’t so innocent, and it isn’t even so good at web searches any more.

Nobody knows better how those ideals were corrupted by greed than Google’s former head of advertising, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who joined in 2003 and became one of the key figures in its astronomical growth. “Google was once a company with strong ideals and a desire to serve,” he reflects.

Perhaps his new venture is his way of doing penance. Ramaswamy is the co-founder and chief executive of Neeva, a stealth start-up that has quietly been building the first true competitor to Google Search in almost two decades. His co-founder, Vivek Raghunathan, was another key Google executive, as head of revenue at YouTube, and Neeva is backed by Reid Hoffman, a member of the PayPal mafia and founder of LinkedIn. They have vowed to be free of advertisements, which Forbes likened to “the world’s most successful butcher opening a vegan restaurant”.

Today, Google dominates the search market, processing more than 92 per cent of searches made in the UK, while Microsoft’s Bing is a very distant second on just 4 per cent. The gap is even bigger on mobile, where most of us spend our screen time, with Google taking a 97 per cent share.

Google also used to be a company that boasted about how little time you spent on its site – the whole point was to send you somewhere else. Today, it is more like The Eagles’ Hotel California: once you check in, you can never leave. This aspect, self-preferencing, became the third investigation that our own Competition Markets Authority (CMA) has made into Google. The CMA last week argued that promoting Google’s own products is anti-competitive. Many people never discover a superior alternative.

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As Google grew, only Microsoft continued to invest in machines that crawled the world’s six billion web pages and analysed them but, these days, Bing isn’t exactly Microsoft’s top priority.

There are other search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, but they don’t crawl at scale, instead putting their own wrapper around Bing’s wholesale offering and augmenting it. That means that whatever you use, you’re seeing the world through Google or Microsoft’s eyes.

Neeva becomes a third choice. So far, it has been closed to general users, with a long waiting list for applicants. Those already in the Neeva club are enthusiastic, and I can see why. The absence of the tricksy adverts was like being catapulted to an Alpine retreat – after years in the urban smog. Neeva itself offers a vivid illustration of why punters are poorly served today. On a mobile search for “migraine headache” only three results are immediately visible on the smartphone’s screen, and on Google, all three are advertisements. None of the three Google results discloses the URL of the source.