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I stumbled across an article on the BBC written by Zoe Kleinman (2022) who introduces Neeva, a consumer-search engine. Neeva’s claim is that it doesn’t make sense that Google, who has the monopoly in the field of search-engines, equips and advertising-search model, in which you (the consumer) are being tracked and actively targeted with personal advertising because your steps on the internet is used to actively lure you. As a response, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who worked at google for 16 years, launched Neeva under the promises of an advertisement-free and tracker-free search engine. It currently serves around 600.000 users and has raised $80 million from investors (Zoe Kleinman, 2022). 

I choose this news-article because I found it interesting to stumble across the tactic used to enroll a new privacy-aware search engine being launched next to DuckDuckGo and Bing who have previously tried to offer an alternative to Google. If we portray Neeva to Garner’s Hype cycle, we are currently in the Innovation trigger phase. A potential innovation kicks things off and through media, Neeva gains significant publicity, however, no real product exists, and the viability is not yet proven.

In my opinion, their tactic is to gain as much attention in the media as possible in the Innovation trigger phase by making bold and aggressive statements about Google, such as:

“Google’s incentive to truly innovate, to truly create disruptive experiences, is not really there”. – CEO Ramaswamy

“We felt the traditional search engines had become about advertising and advertisers and not really about serving users” – CEO Ramaswamy

Hereafter, I found an article that criticizes Neeva’s media tactic’s (such as the statements above) for being ‘marketing propaganda’ (Verdict, 2022). The article in Verdict, a UK news site, interviewed a privacy expert who examined Neeva’s privacy policy and found out that the company is not being honest with their users. It for example states that IP-addresses are being collected and personal information may be shared. 

Overall, I think that Neeva does not offer the disruptive innovation that will make Google nervous. It seems like they want to gain a small market share of a monopoly-market, by making (false) statements of tracker-free and privacy-sensitive search-engine. Currently they have expanded to the UK, Germany and France as of 8 October 2022. The future will learn if they overcome the peak of inflated expectations…

You can check out a video about Neeva here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEbQz4EOZaM

References:

Kleinman, Zoe. (2022). BBC: Ex-Google Ad Boss builds tracker-free search engine. Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63130364

Sladden, Chloe (2022). Verdict: Searching for Neeva: Is the new search engine the real deal? Retrieved from; https://www.verdict.co.uk/searching-for-neeva-is-the-new-search-engine-the-real-deal/  

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About 40% percent of the Dutch population actively monitors one or more health-indicators on a weekly basis (Telecompaper, 2022). Health-indicators can be tracked through applications on your smartphone that include activity-trackers (i.e., counting steps) or dedicated wearable devices that monitor certain behaviors, such as Fitbit devices. These devices are capable of monitoring hearth-rate, diets or fitness-performance and are mostly used by the younger generation (age 18-45)

According to the article by Telecompaper (2022) we see a general trend that the younger generation actively monitors their sleep through such applications, called sleep-trackers. This trend has not gone unnoticed, and markets have played into the consumer’s quest to monitor their sleep intake, especially when academic literature finds that we, on average, lack one hour of sleep every night (the Guardian, 2019). As a result, the market for wearable devices that can monitor one’s sleep has grown to $81 billion. However, these sleep trackers might cause more harm than they do good, as explained by the rise of orthodontia. 

Orthodontia refers to the ‘perfectionist quest’ to always have a perfect night’s sleep and can be compared to similar perfectionist habits such as the quest to always eating healthy, causing unhealthy effects (Telecompaper, 2022). As a result, some people tend to get overly fixated on the data that their sleep-tracking devices extract, while that information might not even be accurate. For a longer time, researchers have doubted the accuracy of these sleep tracking devices, and they mention the so-called reverse-development trend of these consumer devices. Normally, we see that consumer wearables stem from the medical world, however sleep-trackers have been fully developed by Tech companies and sold under false claims of accuracy.

The problem is that today’s wearable technology is just not capable of accurately measuring sleep, such as brain activity. However, these devices have been enrolled on a large scale! Therefore, I agree with the articles that I’ve quoted that there is a mismatch between large-scale of use and the actual capability of the sleep tracking devices. In about 10 years’ time, accurate sleep-tracking technology will have arisen from Silicon Valley, and I will reconsider using it!

Telecompaper. (2022). Four out of 10 Dutch people monitor health on their own. Retrieved 2 October 2022, from https://www.telecompaper.com/news/four-out-of-10-dutch-people-monitor-health-on-their-own–1432550

TheGuardian. (2019). Why sleeptrackers could lead to the rise of insomnia – and orthosomnia. Retrieved 2 October from https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/17/why-sleeptrackers-could-lead-to-the-rise-of-insomnia-and-orthosomnia