No Priors Ep. 8 | With Neeva’s Sridhar Ramaswamy

For the first time in decades web search might be at risk for disruption. Bing is allied with OpenAI to integrate LLMs. Google has committed to launching new products. New startups are emerging. Sridhar Ramaswamy co-founded the challenger AI-powered, private search platform Neeva in 2019. He is a former 16-year Google veteran who most recently led the internet’s most profitable business as SVP in charge of Google Ads, Commerce and Privacy. Sridhar, Elad and Sarah talk about the challenge of building search, how LLMs have changed the landscape, and how chatbots and "answer services" will affect web publishers. 00:00 - Introduction 01:32 - Why Sridhar started a private search engine after leaving Google 11:11 - Information Retrieval Problems, Mapping Search Queries and LLMs 15:25 - Google and Bing’s approach to search with LLMs 19:06 - Scale challenges when building a search engine startup 22:26 - Distribution challenges and why they release Neeva Gist 24:11 - Why Neeva is a privacy centric subscription service 28:25 - The relationship between search and publishers/content creators 30:16 - Sridhar’s predictions on how AI will disrupt current ecosystems