Google Search bar is free, but that doesn't mean there isn't a cost- You are the product

tech.hindustantimes.com:

How many times do you “Google” a day?  How about a year? Rough estimates put the number of searches that Google processes at more than 2 trillion per year and, worldwide, it has a search engine market share of more than 90%. We enjoy Google Search bar for free, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a cost. It just means we are the product.

Bloomberg Opinion columnist Parmy Olson spoke with former Google advertising chief Sridhar Ramaswamy on a Twitter Spaces about the company’s ad model, the intrusive nature of browsing the web and why Google still rules internet search. Ramaswamy was at Google for 15 years, and for the last five years, ran the company’s all important advertising division. He left in 2018 and has since co-founded a competing search engine, Neeva, which makes money through a monthly subscription. Here is a lightly edited transcription of their conversation.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: I was fortunate to be at Google when I was, but after 15 years I wanted a change. I had worked on ads the entire time and helped create a very large and clearly powerful ecosystem. But there was a part of me that wanted to go back to my roots as a software engineer, as a thinker and creator.

There were also aspects of ads at Google that disillusioned me. All of us want to feel good about our jobs. With complicated platforms like YouTube, where there’s all kinds of content — including an endless amount of objectionable content — ads were seen as directly or indirectly supporting that. In particular, 2017 was a year of controversy and towards the end of that year I decided that I really needed a clean break.

I started Neeva because I love the problem of search and wanted to create a simpler, friendlier product. I’m proud that we have created