Why Glean Thinks Google Never Solved the Real Search Problem

Enterprise search has long been considered one of technology’s dead ends. For decades, even the biggest firms failed to build a product that could make finding information inside companies easy or commercially viable. In 2019, Arvind Jain, a former Google Search engineer and co-founder of Rubrik, decided to attack the problem head-on.

At the time, there was no established market to build into. That didn’t matter to Jain, because the problem was one he had seen repeatedly in his own career. At Google, he worked on making search effortless for billions of people on the web, yet the same company struggled to serve its own employees with the same clarity. At Rubrik, the challenge became existential. As the company scaled, surveys showed that employees felt less effective, not more. The common complaint: they couldn’t find what they needed to do their jobs.

“Productivity was dropping,” Jain recalled. “People were not able to get as much work done as they used to when we were small. They couldn’t find information, and they couldn’t find the right people to help them. They felt stuck.”

That sense of frustration became the impetus for Glean. Jain describes his instinct as natural for a search engineer: if the problem is information discovery, the answer is to build a search product designed for the enterprise. “It was shocking to me that there was no search product for businesses,” he said. “Every company has huge amounts of information, and they need it.”