36 ms·

The world needs more search engines

• gfawke5 7y ago
  > “What has Google ever done for us?”. They have done an awful lot for society, for the web and probably saved it a few times a long time ago. But it is time to also see them as the empire they have become. And empires must fall.
  • shadowgovt 7y ago
    They were definitely involved in several precedent setting legal decisions, such as the settlement that allowed for scanning of printed works.
• pythux 7y ago
  Absolutely love this quote from the article: > Paraphrasing Monty Python: “What has Google ever done for us?”. They have done an awful lot for society, for the web and probably saved it a few times a long time ago. But it is time to also see them as the empire they have become. And empires must fall. I think people generally do not understand well enough the far-fetched consequences of a monopoly in the search business. We really need more diversity and competition in this space, not just for quality of results and convenience of services; but for society as a whole. The article rightly points out that Google is a new "Cambridge Analytica" (even on steroids), we should not passively wait for our democracies to break down because information is controlled by a single private entity. Let's step out of our comfort zones, try new products, support the ones we like!
  • shadowgovt 7y ago
    That was an interesting choice of paraphrase. Does the author realize it's part of a gag where the characters go on to list all of the ways that the Roman government had materially improved quality of life for the people under its rule and thereby make their rebellion seem farcical? ;)
    • purple_ducks 7y ago
      Clearly the author does realise this as is evident by the rest of the sentence, which was included in the quote.
      • weinzierl 7y ago
        That doesn't make sense. In the movie the joke is clearly on Reg, the guy who says the words "What have the Romans ever done for us?". I still think the author didn't really get the joke...
        • kwhitefoot 7y ago
          They're German, many Germans are great Python fans. I think you can safely assume they have seen the Life of Brian and analysed it carefully. And yes they got the joke.
  • 1024core 7y ago
    > We really need more diversity and competition in this space, not just for quality of results and convenience of services; but for society as a whole. There are plenty of alternatives. But people don't use them as much because they are worse. Consider Bing ( http://www.bing.com/ http://www.bing.com/ ). It is backed by a company even bigger than Google. MSFT's market cap is 1.155T; Google's is 899B. MSFT is 30% bigger than Google. Why haven't they put more resources on their Bing search engine? Spend a few billion dollars, hire away some of the top search engine experts from Google, and build away!
    • ma2rten 7y ago
      I have spent a few billion dollars and they were not successful.
    • saagarjha 7y ago
      Bing is not a core part of Microsoft’s business.
    • dikei 7y ago
      Google receive over 100 Billion USD per year from ads revenue. If spending a few billion dollars can get you a new Google, then every one would have done it a long time ago.
  • wasdfff 7y ago
    Maybe the solution is not in the free market, but by taking the background of pubmed and create a search.gov. No ads, no algorithms, no bullshit ranking and metrics, no tracking, just pure boolean search with a heavy handed spam filter and jam packed with features for the sake of utility and not engagement.
    • CDSlice 7y ago
      I'm sorry, but a heavy handed spam filter is the absolute last thing I want the government to have. This basically gives the government the best censorship tool they ever had.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • biasedOpinion 7y ago
      Disclaimer: I work at Google, all opinions are my own. >just pure boolean search So if I just repeat the word Facebook a hundred times in my personal website, I'd rank higher than facebook.com when people search for "facebook"? I think simple boolean search works for things like searching books in a library, where you can assume good faith from all the authors. But in the web you can't do that. It's just too easy to game.
  • dewey 7y ago
    > Absolutely love this quote from the article Maybe you should've disclosed that you work at this company?
  • JadeNB 7y ago
    > I think people generally do not understand well enough the far-fetched consequences of a monopoly in the search business. 'far-fetched' (meaning implausible) should be 'far-reaching', right?
  • saalweachter 7y ago
    > The article rightly points out that Google is a new "Cambridge Analytica"... One of the most amusing patterns, both in newspapers and on HN, is how often whenever Facebook does something wrong, the response is "this is why Facebook and Google should be regulated/destroyed/broken up".
• Hackbraten 7y ago
  Thanks but no thanks. I don’t trust a browser nor a search engine if an ad imperium paid for it and gives it away for free. Does the Cliqz browser still disallow plugins, such as ad blockers?
  • pythux 7y ago
    > Does the Cliqz browser still disallow plugins, such as ad blockers? Hey, I work on Cliqz' adblocker (open-source here: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/adblocker https://github.com/cliqz-oss/adblocker). Cliqz browser comes built-in with adblocking, anti-tracking, anti-phishing and private search built-in so that users are protected by default. You can also install another one if you prefer since all Firefox extension are also available from Cliqz! But the one built-in is pretty good already[^1] and we're happy to get more feedback about how we can improve it! Finally, Cliqz search is also available standalone now so feel free to give it a try! https://beta.cliqz.com/ https://beta.cliqz.com/ [^1]: https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html
    • streetcat1 7y ago
      So how does cliqz makes money?
      • tschakkaMarc 7y ago
        Hi, Marc here, I work at Cliqz. We (unfortunately) don’t (at least not a reasonable amount). We have an advertising model, but it does not rely on any personal data. We also always think (and tested) a paid product, which would be the purest and (In my view) best form. Experience unfortunately suggests, that only very few people would pay. But, I would be happy to be convinced otherwise. Going back to the article though: This is exactly why we believe there should be a lot of competition and a variety of different alternatives. And one or the other might figure out a new approach towards financing search.
        • setnone 7y ago
• meerita 7y ago
  I'm more than happy with DuckDuckGo. I would love more specialized search engines. Back in the day I've used several search engines depending the task i needed to perform, from Altavista to Yahoo to Google.
  • netfl0 7y ago
    Beat me to it! Very happy here as well. I also love the bang short cuts. I am actually at the point where google is clearly inferior. I will grant that Google has a more intelligent indexing and ranking of Stack Overflow. However, DDG is making major progress there, and I rarely need to add !g Pro tip: with the bang shortcuts, you can add them anywhere in your query, it does not need to be in the beginning of your query string.
    • buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
      I’ve tried switching to ddg a number of times in the past. Every time the same thing happens: “This result isn’t that great. I’m going to !g just this once” Then, one week later I’m adding !g to literally every singe search so I switch back to google because what’s the point? I really do hope to one day get off of google though.
      • ummonk 7y ago
        For me it helped to switch over my mobile browser in addition to desktop. It's much more of a hassle to type !g so I try to make do with ddg and only use !g if I really have to. After a month or so it seems like my choice of search queries has adapted to better make use of Bing's algorithms, and when I do find myself trying !g, half the time it results in even worse results.
      • visarga 7y ago
        I use StartPage.com which is based on Google but strips the private data.
        • DavideNL 7y ago
• streetcat1 7y ago
  So let's say that google fall and you become the new king. Will you allow another competitor in?
  • TKWasRight 7y ago
    Yes.
    • streetcat1 7y ago
      why? Don't you have fiduciary duty for the owners of the company to maximize profits? Why do you want competition?
      • shishy 7y ago
        Lol, he's just saying that now. Everyone says that kind of stuff when they're not at the top. Then they get there and fully realize their constraints, and it dies down.
        • streetcat1 7y ago
          Yes I know. I just want to see how far he will go with these arguments.
  • Craighead 7y ago
    "All empires must fall because I deserve to be the new emperor"
  • solso 7y ago
    [[Disclaimer I work at Cliqz]] Your question is spot on, many of us ask ourselves the same question. Whether Cliqz would become a bully like Google if successful or not, I believe it's impossible to answer. But at least, we know, that the data we collect from our users to build the search engine is totally anonymous and is used only to build search and the browser. So, in the case that Cliqz would turn evil, I would stop using it, knowing for a fact that there are no sessions about me on their data, none. Someone on the thread mentioned fiduciary duties, true that companies must maximize profit, but that does not mean becoming a gear on global surveillance conglomerate.
• tclover 7y ago
  I'm already degoogling myself, transferring all my emails to tutanota and using firefox with duckduckgo now.
  • throwingtt 7y ago
    I've been doing this too, but every time I check my open connections in my router there are a ton of open connections to 1e100.net
• tanilama 7y ago
  Nah, two or more search engines all being the product of US big techs won't solve the problem. EU should have its own search engine. They should subsidize this effort and have Google pay for it.
  • shadowgovt 7y ago
    I've heard that rhetoric somewhere else, and I expect having Google pay for it will go about as well as having Mexico fund a wall across the border with the US. But the European taxpayer should absolutely pay for it.
    • tpmx 7y ago
      That's not really a comparison that makes sense. Mexico has very little leverage on the US. EU has loads of leverage on Google.
      • shadowgovt 7y ago
        We shall see. It has thus far been in Google's best financial interests to make nice in the European markets because of the size of the user base that they would leave on the table if they responded to EU pressure by shutting down services. I'm unsure if that continues to be true if the EU siphons money off of them to build a direct competitor.
        • tpmx 7y ago
          The EU represents close to 50% of potential/projected revenue to Google in the next 10 years, is my guess. That's what I meant when I wrote "loads of leverage".
          • root_axis 7y ago
            It's not that simple. In a scenario where google was shut out of the EU you'd have a lot of pissed off citizens, and google knows this.
• tasubotadas 7y ago
  >And empires must fall Why?
  • mylons 7y ago
    because they’re often brittle and create closed systems
    • tasubotadas 7y ago
      You have to see yourself that it is a pretty week argument.
    • shadowgovt 7y ago
      This feels like tautological reasoning. Brittle empires fall. The Chinese empire has a history (including mutations to its government) spanning thousands of years.
      • lostlogin 7y ago
        And yet it fell.
        • shadowgovt 7y ago
          The Chinese empire is still there and quite happy. It's communist now, but no less of an empire. It's even currently involved with an aggressive territorial dispute with neighboring land that it used to have total control over, as empires do. [Edited for unnecessary snark; my apologies]
          • changchuming 7y ago
            I would think that undergoing a rebellion or civil war after which the form of governance changes marks the end of an empire, even if the territorial lines are not redrawn.
            • 7y ago
• lawrenceyan 7y ago
  This seems like a pretty blatant advertisement for their company's "Cliqz Browser". You should at least acknowledge your bias by being transparent enough to show you have a vested interest. It's really disingenuous otherwise, and makes it hard to take what you have to say at face value.
  • jefftk 7y ago
    It seems more like an advertisement/justification/explanation for their search engine?
    • lawrenceyan 7y ago
      Yes, according to the post, the "primary benefit" of using Cliqz is so that you can get access to their search engine, which is exclusive to their browser.
      • pythux 7y ago
        That is factually incorrect: https://beta.cliqz.com https://beta.cliqz.com
        • lawrenceyan 7y ago
          You're right, instead of saying exclusive feature I should have stuck with 'primary'. I can see how those two words have different enough meanings to cause confusion. Though it's important to remember that not everyone on here has English as their first language, and we should generally be considerate of that when reading people's comments.
          • deleted 7y ago
            [deleted]
  • freediver 7y ago
    If anything it is likely that it will be the other way around in the near future.
• tasubotadas 7y ago
  93% of a search engine market. Ok. But a search engine is only a smart part of the whole, where and how we get the information. If you slice your market in convenient ways, you can make any company a monopoly.
  • shadowgovt 7y ago
    This is extremely true. It's one of the reasons that Google+ came into existence. And with Google+ being folded up, Google has basically refrained from competing further in social indexing.
• nchase 7y ago
  Is there an english-language version? The website is in German for me
  • __ka 7y ago
    There is - click the settings icon on the top-right corner. Then click on Sucheinstellungen, and under Sprache choose English.
    • FabHK 7y ago
      Might make sense to make that more easily discoverable for international users, but I guess you're working on it.
      • __ka 7y ago
        Yep, we'll try to push an update in the coming days for a more meaningful interface and result language detection.
• softwaredoug 7y ago
  What would a different search engine do to differentiate it from Google? If the answer is privacy, that’s a niche already occupied by DDG. What other ways could a web search engine differentiate itself to be worth customers using more than one?
  • dehrmann 7y ago
    I used to work for a vertical search engine (comparison shopping). For the most part, no one in that space was able to build a brand, and they all depended on either paid or organic traffic from Google to stay open. As the company I was at and competitors started to merge and die, the largest, Nextag, went on a PR campaign to tell people Google's a Monopoly[1]. These vertical search engines, at at least in the comparison shopping space, were never that good to begin with. Shopping (and possibly travel) is just the easiest vertical to monetize. All the sites were spammy, pages were optimized for clickouts, and results were optimized for yield, not relevancy, because everything was an ad. There's a reason none of them were recognizable brands and they all depended on Google for traffic. So yes, not just what niche is there, but how can you make it profitable--or even break-even. Would you donate $10 per year to a non-profit search engine? [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/08/nextag-ceo-google-is-a-monopoly-google-youve-got-plenty-of-choice/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/08/nextag-ceo-google-is-a-mon...
  • rolph 7y ago
    allow the end user to tweak the search criterion easily. there are times when i dont want the "most relevant" results. i want things like historical order or alphabetic order. or even in order of ISBN number. i really miss using an image itself for query terms.
• seanwilson 7y ago
  I feel the problem most people have when thinking about monopolies is if a monopoly produces a product that people like right now (e.g. they like the features, they like the cost), people don't see the monopoly as a problem and even will even defend it thinking it's great ("I love company X, they make amazing products, they deserve their success!"). The problem with monopolies is when the company decides to e.g. price gouge or gets lazy by not innovating. Companies can only really get away with this and survive when they have a monopoly. Monopolies also kill competing products and deter other companies from even attempting to enter the market - so you might love the product of a monopoly right now but if the monopoly had never existed an even better product could be available today. I think people generally love Google's products but it would be good to see more competition. The upfront investment you would need to create a competing search engine is prohibitively high so most companies aren't going to attempt to make their own.
  • tschakkaMarc 7y ago
    Hi, Marc from Cliqz (and one of the authors of the linked article): We at Cliqz do try and others (like mojeek in the UK or Seznam in Czech) are trying as well. But yes, it has very high costs. We did a lot of (I find smart) technical shortcuts (and will explain how in the next days in our blog), but it is still an investment. The main hurdle is however distribution. As said in the article, Google spends 1/4 of their revenue to block market access and this makes the investment case nearly impossible. It's their strategy to stop competitive innovation. This no company can solve and why e.g., in Europe you do see the 93% market share of Google. This is where this becomes a political topic. In fact since search tends to be a natural monopoly and information is so important this is where politics has to regulate and ensure competition. In an ideal world there would be 4-5 competing search engines in every region ...
    • techslave 7y ago
      search is not close to being a natural monopoly. you are vastly underestimating how strong google’s execution has been. perhaps because you need to convince yourself that you could compete, “if only” ...
• adamnemecek 7y ago
  If someone wants to build a better search engine, start with a better code search and then expand to other areas. Github search is so bad.
  • shadowgovt 7y ago
    Improved online code search and indexing feels like a very untapped market.
• DeonPenny 7y ago
  No it does not. Google is one of the few things that need only need one of.
• pcmaffey 7y ago
  I want to see niche search engines: - a search engine for blogs - a search engine for dev questions - a search engine for shopping - a search engine for diy etc. Im really tired of sites trying to centralize and own this content. The key to decentralizing and empowering individuals to own their content is enabling distribution and discovery. New search engines are essential to the web we want.
  • choward 7y ago
    > a search engine for shopping That would be nice especially since hopefully it would mean there would be a search engine I could use and not get shopping results. It seems like anytime I search for something I get shopping results so I have to be more specific and type more which is inconvenient. Wikipedia used to be the first result for many things I search for now it pretty much never is. It's been getting worse every year. On a pretty unrelated note, it would also be nice if I could search the play app store without getting games in my results. There's pretty much a game related to everything I want to search for. Very annoying.
  • skyfaller 7y ago
    Anyone remember Technorati when it had a blog search engine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technorati https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technorati I recently noticed one of my old blog posts had Technorati tags in it, and that was a blast from the past. http://consumingexperience.com/2005/02/technorati-tags-introduction.html http://consumingexperience.com/2005/02/technorati-tags-intro... I'm pretty sure that we won't see a significant blog search engine again until blogs regain some of the power they lost to social media.
  • buboard 7y ago
    google will neatly incorporate their results in their index and then people will go back to searching in google. I mean it happens with all major sites (stackoverflow, shopping results, diy/pinterest). Only twitter and facebook , who completely block their content from google get away. Perhaps we should take a lesson or two from them.
    • 7y ago
• sojmq 7y ago
  This is an advertisement for the Cliqz search engine. Let's remember that Cliqz is the advertising company that the Mozilla Corporation sent our private history browsing to back in the day: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
• clorine64 7y ago
  hvae been using the CLITZ browser for some time and really enjoy it.
  • mikl 7y ago
    > CLITZ browser Rather unfortunate typo, that.
• amelius 7y ago
  What happens to our data when this empire falls?
  • SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    Ready for the subprime data to be bundled with AAA rated data causing a data industry micro-economic collapse? Because I am!
  • chinesempire 7y ago
    the same thing that happen to everything else most it's saved, some is lost forever
  • bcrosby95 7y ago
    It's sold off to the highest bidder. Because it isn't technically our data.
• tziki 7y ago
  How did such blatant advertisement make it to the top of HN? The article quality here has really been going downhill.
  • Ericson2314 7y ago
    Cause people like the headline and talk about that? :D
    • monstapatty 7y ago
      Google bad.
• dehrmann 7y ago
  Feel free to go use Bing. It's been an option for 10 years.
• freediver 7y ago
  It is impressive what they built. The results are quite good! The UI shows innovative elements like trackers used on the page. I see two problems with their approach: 1. The product is not built with the 'grandma test' mindset. More sliders and widgets is not what your grandma wants in a search engine. This is why building a search engine is hard. You have to guess with very little information what the user wants and get it in front of them at first try, without the user having to tweak anything. 2. Google must not fall because it is a monopoly. If it was to fall it should be because someone built a better product. Similar to how ICE cars had "monopoly" over transportation and the time for change has thankfully come. Not because monopolies are bad, but because electric cars are so freaking awesome. Google perfected what the 'best search engine' is to 99% of population. This comes at an expense of really annoying 1% of users but it is the price they are willing to pay. To de-throne Google you really need to cater to broad population with a product that will be better both at capturing intent and delivering and presenting relevant results. This may or not come with a different business model.
  • nileshtrivedi 7y ago
    The article says: > One could rightfully counter that Google has a good product. They even offer it for free. But Google Ads are not free. If Search is the product, then advertisers are the customers, not users.
    • zarkov99 7y ago
      Yes. Google has a superior product riding on top of a corrupting business model that cannot help but mis align Google's interests with those of the users they are claiming to serve. Google should unbundle the current business model from the technology and also offer clean, unbiased, private search service that is paid by the user on a subscription basis. I would jump on the chance to pay say $10 a month for Google quality search if I knew my search was private and the results were not influenced by outside parties.
      • K0SM0S 7y ago
        Ballpark estimate, how much would you pay for the entirety of your digital life being private? All of it, bar none?
• gopher2 7y ago
  I'd like a better (paid) way to search for medical advice/information
• mbowcutt 7y ago
  So, what's different about cliqz? You promise not to keep logs, skew results, and sell data? Also, > With 93% of the search market, Google’s algorithms decide what becomes truth. Can you think of a TV channel with a 93% audience? Would you find it acceptable if there were only one TV channel? Seems to me like Google is more analogous to the TV remote.
  • FabHK 7y ago
    As blog post mentions, more than half of Google searches do not result in an (out-)click, but stay on Google. So, the comparison is not completely outlandish.
• keepper 7y ago
  It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric. I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity. This “romantization” of this ideal state, devoid of historical context or acknowledgement of the world we live in is extremwly counter productive. Should google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple do better? Absofuckinglutely!!! Regulate them, hold them to a higher standard! But Will breaking them up do anything except destroy them and just empower the next competitor ( who will have to learn the same lessons? Even worse, likely in a country that won’t match your same values of “freedom” Are imbalances in power great? Nope Are monopolies awesome? Most never Are billionaires awesome? Nope But this is the stage we are at due to an interconnect global economy. We built this. Knee jerk solutions don’t and have never fixed anything
  • throwthisaway2 7y ago
    They are not a gov agency, i dont see the problem. To the victor goes the spoils. Are they doing something illegal? What number of search engines is a good number, why? This line of thinking is subjective.
  • SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    I was around too. The problem is you think the Google of 2000 is the Google of 2019. It is not. Apparently some people are still fooled by the doodles and dinosaur jump game. It’s easy to say MORE REGULATIONS... just as after any tragedy people claim “we just need one more law”! The truth is government has proven toothless in tax collection and regulation of these giants.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • sophacles 7y ago
    I'm not sure applying antitrust laws (which have been in place for longer than anyone has been alive) to a monopoly (which has been acting monopolistic for years) qualifies as knee-jerk.
  • 7y ago
• helpPeople 7y ago
  Google is getting bad, but I want a decent competitor to Windows/Android. Apple is not competition. They serve a lax customer base.
• bko 7y ago
  Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what I'm looking for. For instance: "the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman" ddg: Tom Holland (side bar) Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb) Tom Holland (wiki) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (imdb) google: Jonathan Kimble Simmons (splash, link to wiki) J. Jonah Jameson (wiki) J. K. Simmons (wiki) The google result is exactly what I want. And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user. At the end of the day, most people care about the product. I'm only willing to sacrifice so much to satisfy the ideal that there should be less concentration. Make a better search engine but trying to pull at the heart-strings of users about how Google is an empire and too powerful just won't work and it undermines your product and mission.
  • xfitm3 7y ago
    It is really good when you search for vague terms, but it seems to come at the cost of ruining precision technical search. Google also censors some results in controversial categories, where Bing/Yahoo return what I am looking for. I don't trust a search engine that censors entire categories of results. I am not an adwords user but anecdotes in another HN thread seems to affirm that Google is due to be disrupted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667484
    • 9588 7y ago
      to give a fun example for those who didnt run into this silly agenda. "free energy" use to produce countless results that now require extra keywords. Under "free energy suppression" you find professionally crafted hatemongering. The actual list of claimants is huge, non of it is here. https://peswiki.com/directory:suppression#Wiki_2796702 https://peswiki.com/directory:suppression#Wiki_2796702 "free energy device" also produces really crappy results compared to what it was. It only seems like things argued not to exist may or must be scrubbed from seach results. Astrology wasn't scrubed nor was any religion. Everything has its history too!
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  Can I please pay someone to let me customize search? I know what results I don't want, but there's no way for me to bundle a custom filter to exclude them.
• ummonk 7y ago
  Best of luck to these guys. Is there a way that Cliqz (or any other search engine) will manage to break through when even Bing is unable to get significant traction despite Microsoft throwing its weight and its default Edge installations behind it? Hopefully there will be even more stringent antitrust enforcement to prevent Google from buying favorable search placement everywhere, but Google has such a big edge both in consumer awareness and people adapting their searches to Google that I'm not sure how it can be dethroned.
• neltnerb 7y ago
  Wow. You can't even do a search without enabling javascript. Surely no tracking implications there. Yeah, I'm going to stick with DDG. Questionable ownership aside they at least have a functional website without running javascript.
• dageshi 7y ago
  The world doesn't want more search engines though. Like the world doesn't want another streaming service to pay for, it just wants everything in one place which costs $15 a month or preferably free.
• weinzierl 7y ago
  I looked into the Cliqz browser a few years a ago. Back then they claimed to be a privacy respecting alternative to Chrome. What I found back then is that they sent every keystroke I type in the URL bar to their own servers. They outright lied about that in their terms. For me their mission is pretty clear: Google ate Burda's ad cookies and now they are trying to get their hands into the cookie jar again. Given that today we have widespread TLS adoption the war about the endpoint has begun. Cliqz, alias Burda Media, is just another combatant - the one who controls the browser controls the ads. Previous thread with more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626790
  • tpllaha 7y ago
    They have an autosuggest feature in the browser which shows search results as you type. Goes without saying that this requires a request per keystroke. If each request contained a unique user id, that would be concerning, but that is not the case. that the search query itself goes to their servers is just common sense, but those requests are anonymized. (Disclaimer: I'm a former employee)
    • hu3 7y ago
      Keystrokes + IP = NSA knows exactly what I'm typing. This "feature" should be off by default on any software that claims to be a privacy respecting alternative to Chrome.
      • Aeolun 7y ago
        Can you ID someone positively by their typing patterns and an IP?
        • unnouinceput 7y ago
          Yes. Also search WW2 war stories about radio operators, this technique dates back since then. US Pacific operators always knew which Japanese radio operator was transmitting Morse codes by listening to their typing patterns. And if a human was able to do it, imagine the accuracy of computers in this regard.
• baxtr 7y ago
  This reminds me of an old quote by Wayne Gretzky. “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” Google will not be replaced by another search engine. It will be something else. Something we can’t imagine yet.
• LyalinDotCom 7y ago
  Just Bing it :-)
• bbulkow 7y ago
  A competitive market with high barrier to entry seems to stabilize at 3 entrants. Others that might seem to be in market are niche players. Scale is good for consumers, benefit of scale is a thing, so 'trust busting' should happen if there are fewer than three. In the us search market, we have google, ddg, and Bing. Wanting more choice is very American, but it's hard to take seriously.
  • simplicio 7y ago
    I don't think search really has a high barrier to entry. Certainly not compared to things I usually associate the term with like, say, airplane manufacture or deep sea oil extraction. Duck Duck Go only had three employees when they passed a million visitors, so I can't imagine they required huge amounts of capital.
    • FabHK 7y ago
      > I don't think search really has a high barrier to entry. Others disagree, including Google Chief Economist Hal Varian, who said (in 2008)[1]: “Scale is pretty critical [because] search technology exhibits increasing returns to scale.” Or Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Marketing: “So more users more information, more information more users, more advertisers more users, more users more advertisers, it’s a beautiful thing." Or Eric Schmidt: “Scale is key. We just have so much scale in terms of the data we can bring to bear.” “We are a company that operates at scale . . . trust me it is a scale company.” “We think search is about comprehensiveness, freshness, scale and size for what we do. It’s difficult for [Microsoft] to copy that.” It seems obvious to me that internet search has both economies of scale and network effects, both classic barriers to entry. [1] http://fairsearch.org/fact-checking-google-scale-is-a-barrier-to-entry-in-search/ http://fairsearch.org/fact-checking-google-scale-is-a-barrie...
• zulgan 7y ago
  It is already too late for Google to fall. Even if it falls something worse will take its place. What are our options? Government? How will it be even remotely close? Data will be needed, How will the government get data? They will probably make it mandatory in schools of course. Why not? its for the good of the children. Interesting times indeed. “The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional , personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself by the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice.” ― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
• abbadadda 7y ago
  > There are only very few truly independent search engines in the world. Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are the best known ones. Most other players only white label results from those four and are dependent on them and their business model. Does this mean the article is insinuating that DuckDuckGo is dependent on another search engine? Is this true? Or are DDG results organic?
  • hollerith 7y ago
    DDG depends very heavily on Bing.
  • kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
    There are prolly only 3 global English language indexes. Google, Bing, Yandex. DDG uses vague language to make themselves look like they are actual search engines, which would make you think they actually index the web. The truth is they rely largely on Bing and Google results and mostly just rerank them. That's why it's hard to take their PR seriously.
    • FabHK 7y ago
      DDG's main selling point is that they respect your privacy. I could not care less where they get their results from. As such, I continue to take their "PR" seriously.
      • kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
        All I'm saying is it's pointless to consider them a realistic competitor of Google, Bing etc. when they basically punt over the most crucial infra aspect of being a search engine and when their service is more akin to querying the Bing API from a headless browser and mildly rearranging the results. It's also clear that they try to obfuscate this fact by claiming "more than 500 signals / sources", which means they feel that being more upfront about the truth would work against them.
  • mobjack 7y ago
    DDG primarily relies on Bing for its search ads. I wouldn't be surprised if it is the primary source of their search results either. Developing a new search engine from scratch that can compete with Google is almost impossible unless you are at the scale of Microsoft. It is much easier to white label an existing search engine so you can have good search results on day one.
• slowenough 7y ago
  This is cool. But some criticism. UI seems a bit janky. Results are good but visually presented in a way it's hard to tell each result card from the next. Cliqz is a bad name, even tho you may want the world to be a cyberpunk dystopia where renegade hackers control the outposts of civilization, Google has not fallen yet, pick a name the 99% can relate to. And get Machiavellian ... if you're really gonna beat Google, you're not gonna do it with hippy tactics, no love flowers light or manifestos. You have to get evil and more evil than Google. You have to out evil the big evil. Realistically if I were trying to beat Google I wouldn't be building a search engine. What can you offer that they can't? And if you even begin to compete with them there, what steps can they take that you can't recover from? Instead, I would focus on beating them first, building search later (if search is what you actually care about). What's Google's weakness? Figure out "the cord that makes them run" (to paraphrase Meredith Vickers in Prometheus) and relentlessly attack that (legally, of course, this is business not cartel turf war). I have no idea what that might be, but Rome fell, IBM fell (well, stumbled, I guess?), so Google must have its Visigoths or Bill Gateses or whatever. You built something cool, that replicates the functionality (80%). Cool. Good for you. You proved you can do it. Now decide if you really are serious about "beating Google", and figure out an effective way to do that. Search engine is not the way. Anyway, Google built the (past of) search. If you really wanna do search, build the (future of) search. I dunno, like AR/VR search? Search for FBs AR platform? I have no idea but text search on WebPages is the past. Google already won. Get over it and move on. Build the future, or go build a better steam engine, you know, for like fun and stuff. Because it's cool, but it won't ever beat Google. Sorryz Cliqz
  • solso 7y ago
    [disclaimer I work at Cliqz] We are all ears on ideas on how to beat Google :-) But on a serious note; i do not think that the aim is to beat Google because of Google but because on the monopoly they have on the access to the information. And that's why we are building a potential alternative there. Attacking from a different domain, might beat Google on that area, or let's go wild here, perhaps even on revenue, but would not fix the problem we wanted to fix to the begin with. "Replicating" 99% of the functionality with a quality to be good enough is a very valid option IMHO. Otherwise if one decides to leave Google, where do they go? If they do not want to advertise on Google, where do they go? There are too few alternatives, there are many names, but most of them are aggregators (full or partial). That said, if besides Bing, there would be 4 or 5 like them (or better), then yes, I concede that Cliqz as is, would make no sense.
• jefftk 7y ago
  I played with the search engine some, and I'm surprised how behind their crawl is for my blog and some blogs I follow. For example, it looks like it last indexed www.jefftk.com in August 2017, compared to Bing and Google which crawled it this month. www.benkuhn.net looks like Summer 2017. pedestrianobservations.com looks like April 2019. apenwarr.ca looks like January 2019. No preview for danluu.com or sideways-view.com. (Disclosure: I work for Google, not on search)
• q4Zar 7y ago
  use brave and switch you search engine to duckduckgo
• arrosenberg 7y ago
  How do you design regulation that holds the giants accountable, doesn't impair smaller companies' ability to enter/innovate in the space, and isn't quickly corruptible by the (well-resourced) companies you are trying to control? We're better served by breaking them up and enforcing and strengthening the pro-competition laws on the books. The government has a pretty mixed record with regulating industry, and a far more impressive record of investigation, enforcement, and prosecution - corporate break-ups are far more in the wheelhouse. Regulation requires constant vigilance, whereas a breakup is self-executing once the case is won. It's not anti-success rhetoric, so much as an acknowledgement that tech has become increasingly concentrated and anti-democratic. The Sherman Act was passed in 1890 - these aren't "knee jerk" solutions - they've worked effectively in the past to curb corporate abuses.
  • xixixao 7y ago
    My biggest problem is: How do you break up a software system? I understand how you break up a company that mines ore, produces steel, builds railways, runs transportation - those are all separable ventures that can negotiate contracts almost as easily as when they had a single owner. But the tech giants run a single system: Amazon in the delivery, FB in the social graph (DB), Google in the knowledge graph. Those would be incredibly hard technically to break up. The less technically complicated split would mean that one new company has all the revenue and the other has all the costs. I haven’t heard any credible proposal on how this “breakup” would actually physically work. If anyone has links to good sources I’d be interested.
    • neonate 7y ago
      Could you fork it instead? Make a copy of the whole thing and then let the two compete over time. Counterargument: you can't copy the people who know how it works.
    • zajd 7y ago
      Easy, stop letting them dump other services for free on the backs of their other businesses. Search can stay ad-supported. Youtube, Gmail, Drive, Cloud, Stadia, Android, News? Should all be broken out into their own businesses and forced to be profitable on their own. As it is, nobody can enter those spaces without being willing to lose hundreds of millions (billions?) of dollars.
• ro-_-b 7y ago
  Tried it out in German. Works definitely better for German language queries than Duckduckgo. Kudos to whomever is behind this & best of luck. The world needs alternatives to Google.
• hnuser77 7y ago
  Cliqz plans to make money by, in the future, "deliver[ing] sponsored offers to users based on their interests and browsing history...processed locally based on a remote repository of offers, with no personally identifiable data sent to remote servers" This is the reason they're pushing their browser and their extension. Privacy wise, this method sounds OK if they really don't send the data (or what ads you see personally) out. I don't mind seeing ads if they are somewhat relevant, non-obtrusive, and not stalking me across the internet. My first impression about Cliqz search is that it is somewhat viable, but the index is pretty shallow. There are actually a few other search engines with their own index not mentioned by the article (Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu): * Mojeek. Sometimes really good for obscure sites when you want to "grep the internet" but seems very vulnerable to blogspam and other SEO. Maybe I just haven't figured out how to query this one yet. * Yippy. Pretty decent index. Cool feature: categorizes search results with a tree on the side, so if you search for "cobbler" you can just remove the pie or shoe results depending on what you're looking for. * Gigablast / private.sh: private.sh is the new Gigablast proxy run by PIA. Shallow index as well, haven't used it as much. The search engine market will be up for grabs if Google keeps getting worse at the same pace.
• h0h0h0h0111 7y ago
  One piece of feedback - currently your site governs language by region, rather than by browser language.
• mlinksva 7y ago
  > There are only very few truly independent search engines in the world. Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are the best known ones. Most other players only white label results from those four and are dependent on them and their business model. Or they are so localized and small that they do not offer a credible alternative. Nevertheless, we at Cliqz are also trying to build one: over the last five years, with around 100 people, we have built our own search engine beta.cliqz.com from scratch. It’s completely independent, it does not use anyone’s technology nor anyone’s business model. It’s built end-to-end from collecting, crawling, and analyzing data up to actually showing results all this with privacy by design. We’re quite proud of it. And each day until this Christmas, we will explain one core piece. I look forward to reading the rest of the series. I see no mention of their technology being open source, which makes it a lot less interesting as an alternative, to me. Their search UI seems OK, once I turned off all of the noisy widgets, including the terrible pretty background image. I wish this trend would go away, but I'm glad they provided an option to turn it off.
• RileyJames 7y ago
  I’m not sure I agree that we need a new google, or to break up google. But we shouldn’t trust google, what trust existed has been repeatedly damaged by their desire to grow and profit. In my opinion we need transparency. Why is a result / snippet number 1, 2, 3, etc for a query? “The algorithm did it” is not an answer. Any new search engine should be accountable for the results they provide, and there should be a mechanism to dispute the results.
• dewey 7y ago
  Was looking at that Cliqz company out of curiosity and while browsing their job page (https://cliqz.com/en/about/careers/campaign-manager https://cliqz.com/en/about/careers/campaign-manager) saw this: "MyOffrz is opening a brand new marketing discipline: Browser Based Performance Marketing. This innovative technology makes it possible to show users discounts, special offers and valuable information with true added value within the browser. As a 100% subsidiary of Cliqz GmbH..." "These include independent search engine, browser and privacy technologies as well as new techniques for responsible advertising and statistical data collection for the benefit of all users." Seems a bit odd for a company that brands itself as a privacy search engine.
  • rbinv 7y ago
    > Seems a bit odd for a company that brands itself as a privacy search engine. Cliqz is nothing but a parasite disguised as a pro-privacy product, funded by Hubert Burda Media (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Burda_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Burda_Media). Their strategy to move into the couponing/voucher market comes as no surprise, since injecting ads (which this basically is) is a very lucrative business - and they have the customer base to do so. The line between malware and "legitimate" browser (extension) becomes increasingly blurred.
  • detaro 7y ago
    Their entire premise is that they can do an ad-financed product with less invasive tracking. Obviously, that involves advertising people.
    • rbinv 7y ago
      Tracking and targeting are just two possible reasons why people dislike ads. Invasiveness is another one - think popups, popunders, layers, interstitials, pre-/postrolls etc. So even if they don't do "tracking", injecting ads surely isn't something the average user "signed up for" when downloading the browser.
      • detaro 7y ago
• agumonkey 7y ago
  Do we need search ? It made sense when the web was wild. But now that it's very structured ... I'm wondering. Kinda like road signs vs gps
  • radmarshallb 7y ago
    The road system seems pretty structured and we still have road signs.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• entangledqubit 7y ago
  While I am curious about their search tech, it would be nice if they posted a blog post about their business model so we can understand their incentives up front. While I'm wishing, it would be nice to hear about how they anonymize their logs. Their privacy notice only really mentions scrubbing associated IP addresses - which may not be sufficient.
• blauditore 7y ago
  Submission title doesn't match article. Was it changed in the article or is this clickbait?
• hsaliak 7y ago
  I want alternatives too - they are good for the consumer. This article was negative to the point of being unreadable. This is not how you disrupt.
• pmontra 7y ago
  Some feedbacks about the product. I made some typical searches I do in my job. They returned reasonable results. Impossible to know if they are better or worse than Google. I need some days of usage. I'll do my best to keep using it this week. Maybe autodecting the language would help. It gave me a German page without any obvious way to change to English. I went to the settings, changed the language and discovered that it wants to know my country. I left Germany because it looks like profiling and I don't want to help them at it. Then I disabled every feature (news, weather, etc). I'm interested into a search engine, not into a portal from the 90s. However I'm afraid that Cookies Autodelete and other privacy extensions will delete those settings and I'll have to do it again. I'll probably hide them with uBlock Origin. For the language a URL ending with something like ?lang=en would be great for bookmarks. And finally, do we need more independent search engines? Yes, definitely.
  • __ka 7y ago
    Many thanks for the feedback. We'll add the language autodetection for the interface and results this week. There is no profiling taking place. The country is just to select what index you would like results from - we'll try to make the UI better. This is still beta, so please keep on using it and we'd love to hear more feedback [beta@cliqz.com].
    • Aeolun 7y ago
      I second the need to do some form of detection for language. My browser tells webpages I want results in english (Accept-language header), and this can be safely used to detect what is most appropriate initially. If not that, then at least IP, considering I’m sitting in the US.
      • __ka 7y ago
        Yep, the The Accept-language header seems the most reasonable to go for. Will try to get it out as early as possible.
      • FabHK 7y ago
        Please not IP. I hate it when stupid sites insist on switching to Latvian or whatever because that's my current VPN endpoint.
• aorth 7y ago
  Hmm, cliqz.com is in the blocklists of several DNS servers I'm using, so are they the underdogs we need to cheer for against Google et al, or are they some shady spammers as determined by the community of adblock list maintainers?
  • kkm 7y ago
    Hi Aorth, Disclaimer: I work for Cliqz. We are aware of this and it's unfortunate, although the lists are not the main ones from community like Easylist, uBlock Origin etc. Cliqz does need to collect data to build it's search engine and other features. Even though we do with by privacy-by-design in mind and without collecting any PII (we will be sharing more details on the process on data collection in the blogposts scheduled for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday),still we do end up getting on such lists. Of course, you don't need to trust what we say, all the code used for collecting data is open-source for transparency and auditing. Additionally, also happy to help setup network debugging incase you want check what exactly goes out. - https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-core https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-core We are also willing to discuss with the maintainers of the list and explaining what and how data collection is done.
• marban 7y ago
  If you're looking for an alternative, dedicated tool to search US news give https://yetigogo.com https://yetigogo.com a whirl. I'm indexing the top ~150 sites in real-time.
• ReptileMan 7y ago
  I don't want google to fall. I want it to become better. The google results have moved from good (2004) to great(2006-2009) to good (2010-2011) and are on a slope to completely useless from there on .. right now are in shitty.
• tehabe 7y ago
  the problem is, I might have no reason to trust Google but I trust software like Cliqz even less, even though they tell me, that I should trust them (maybe because of this). Also Cliqz belongs to Hubert Burda Media, a company which I trust even less.
  • aorth 7y ago
    Right. I was really feeling the call to action in the blog post until I tried to visit beta.cliqz.com and realized it was blocked by the filters I'm using in uBlock Origin and by the DNS-level adblocking I have on my network. Hmmm.
• tracer4201 7y ago
  LOL @ several accounts of people who work at this company selectively responding positively but ONLY to those who are already on the “Google = bad” bandwagon. I’m extremely disappointed in the HN discussion here. The blog post is by someone wanting to compete with Google. Great. The entirety of the post makes ZERO compelling arguments about what features, guarantees, or outcomes their product will provide. In the last couple paragraphs, they mention the word privacy - okay but how so? What’s the business model? Why should I trust you? The blog post is nothing more than an attack on Google (and other tech companies, but that comes later in the article). That’s the only “substance”. There’s no question that key regulation is missing in the space. But what exactly is Google even doing that is anti consumer and killing competition? What anti trust laws have they broken? Should we identify them or maybe determine what is missing in our legal framework? If the author wants to compete with Google, perhaps they can share that insight. That be productive. >Google is Cambridge Analytica on steroids. That’s a pretty damning statement and unproductive. You want to make an emotional argument and have keyboard activists work for YOU instead of sticking to objective facts. Disappointing this is #1 on the front page. We are turning HN into Reddit.
• sigzero 7y ago
  The world had more search engines. A lot more. Google beat them all and they all folded.
• 29athrowaway 7y ago
  What do you think would happen if Google disappears? My bet is that Baidu would take over and then you would have even more problems.
• golemotron 7y ago
  You can't compete with search directly. It's entrenched. The best you can do is make it irrelevant by occluding it with something that provides better value.. voice-based assistants, for instance.
• SllX 7y ago
  I agree with this statement, my default reaction would be to say “build one” but you have. I’ll give Cliqz the old college try, but I hope you make it a priority to get into the next release of MobileSafari as an option if you’re intent with taking on Google and taking them on seriously. Here’s a data point of one: my default method of “searching the web” is to start with Search on iOS, what you get when you pull down on the home screen. When the results I want aren’t there, and I can usually anticipate when that will happen, I shift it over to Safari which uses whatever my default is, DuckDuckGo but mainly because I can change my search engine on the fly with them. I also hope you incorporate the same syntax as DuckDuckGo (if you haven’t already) because to be blunt, every search engine I’ve used in the last few years is terrible. I can’t use just one, and I end up doing a lot of fancy site searches. Not even Google today is as good as Google from 2007-2008.
• jjuhl 7y ago
  Somewhat suspicious that www.cliqz.com is hosted by Google..
• pelasaco 7y ago
  not a real option if its not full opensource. Being German myself I don't believe in a gmbh based in Munich trying to save the world, sorry.
• unnouinceput 7y ago
  Quote: "There are only very few truly independent search engines in the world. Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are the best known ones. Most other players only white label results from those four and are dependent on them and their business model" Well, DuckDuckGo is pretty known and independent of Google. Not long time ago was an article here on HN about how DDG operates and they have their own web crawler, not relying on Google.
  • FabHK 7y ago
    As others have pointed out, DDG appears to use Bing for the majority of their results, as such is not a "truly independent search engine[]".
• mjlee 7y ago
  Perhaps the .dev tld isn't the best venue for this post. For those who don't know, .dev is operated by Google.
• michalu 7y ago
  Not a fan of Google at all, but I'll pick them over "privacy focused search engine" owned by German publisher of Playboy any time of the day. These guys call for banishment of "search monopoly" yet are in it for the money and business share. Privacy is just a currently sound competitive angle.
• cocktailpeanuts 7y ago
  is it just me or the site can't be reached?
• ajay_sibri04 7y ago
  We all get a vote on this. I moved to firefox, duckduckgo and protonmail, but still use youtube (with ad blocker).
• d_burfoot 7y ago
  I think it's strange that companies like France (and Germany, UK, Japan, etc) don't pass a law saying "Only French companies may service web search requests originating in France". Web search is basically going to be a monopoly, so they might as well try to ensure that the vast economic rents created by the monopoly go to one of their one companies. There is a very strong national security argument here: you don't want your citizens' web searches to be controlled by a foreign company, even if you're nominally allied with the country, because of the immense political power that control of web search entails. This kind of policy would unite the populists on both the left and the right. The left would like the idea of redistributing money away from big American technobillionaires to local businesses, while the right would appreciate putting the interests of the nation first.
  • tim333 7y ago
    We'd get annoyed by being unable to use Google or Bing as there are not many such local services. The governments might be able to extract some more of the rents by taxing Google et al more.
• kbyatnal 7y ago
  There needs to be a new search engine focused on the niche of people who hate the current ad spam/SEO results that Google currently returns. A query like "best headphones" returns results like "The Best Headphones for 2019 | PCMag.com". They've clearly optimized for the mass user base, since the average person is probably fine with a result like that. But I'm willing to bet no one on HN would ever click a link like that, just because of how "spammy" it feels. When I search for something like "best headphones", my ideal results would be forum/discussion posts (eg. like "Ask HN") where I can read what other programmers/hackers are using, their experience with it, etc. And that's the problem with trying to make a one-size-fits-all search engine - it isn't possible to make everyone happy. I've actually been working on a product to solve this exact problem. The best comparison would be the old "discussions" filter that Google used to have until they removed it. I'd love to show more people and get feedback. If this is something you'd be interested in trying, drop your email here ( https://degoogle.typeform.com/to/QzVy7c https://degoogle.typeform.com/to/QzVy7c ) and I'll send you the beta
  • sambull 7y ago
    Just type reddit after every query and you've got the same function
    • teawrecks 7y ago
      As long as you're ok with only searching reddit...
      • buboard 7y ago
        what else is there to search, honestly? 1000 headphone affiliate sites? "honest" reviews sponsored by sennheiser? Reddit at least provides generally-ungamed reactions and high density of opinions. Adding "reddit" is the default for any search that matters for me nowadays. I was just searching "game payment gateway" , reddit had the most informative comments.
        • kbyatnal 7y ago
• buboard 7y ago
  Google's business is advertising, not search. That's where their monopoly lies and that's where competition is needed. We probably don't need many other search engines. There is only so many improvements to be done in search. Over the years, information has been distilled. Google's main use is as a misspelling corrector, a wikipedia shortcut, a DNS shortcut, a keyword lookup for the news of the day and a product matcher in a few merchant sites. That's because most commercial sectors of the net are already in their post-competitive period, and only the winners in each category are still alive. Their number is not even enough to fit the first page of results. And the content that used to go in blogs, it's now behind twitter or facebook, unreachable to any search engine (except for corporate blogs which are used for SEO reasons). The recent changes in google search have infantilized it, burying anything but the most obvious sites. SEO doesnt even count that much, instead it's curated "reputation" that matters.We might be at a point where DMOZ is probably viable, because there aren't now 1000 entries in each category, but 10. In fact a Dmoz would probably be a mightier competitor to their search. But the key is , we need competition in advertising. After http referrer was removed from queries, we left all the information about the user's intent to google, and, unsurprisingly , they ate it all, and then some more, leaving a progressively diminishing piece of the advertising/intent processing pie to the rest of the internet. Is that ethical? Is it OK that a website doesn't know why the user visited it? After all, the user typed it in the browser's bar , not on google. Perhaps search queries should be initiated in the browser, and available to subsequent clicks for processing. And as for tracking, is it OK that google is the only one who is tracking users? Shouldnt tracking be a user's decision, provided and mediated by the browser to any website who asks for it? Like it or not, advertising is not going away and it's healthier for the net if a large number of publishers share that (growing) pie rather than if google eats all of it. Tracking doesnt kill people, but anti-tracking hysteria causes many people to lose their jobs. Perhaps we should be pragmatic, because being irrationally anti-pragmatic is only serving Google's long-term interests
  • t0astbread 7y ago
    I think I get what you're saying but I'm not sure this is the right approach. It's accepting diminished rights in exchange for a stable compromise versus fighting for an absolutist solution at the risk of breaking the whole system. And personally I'd rather have no internet at all than an internet that's a weird murky tracking soup where a hundred different parties are creepily looking over my shoulder, knowing more about me than what I would tell even my closest friends and family.
• utopcell 7y ago
  Google's US market share is 62.4% with Bing at 25.3% and rising [1]. That doesn't seem like a monopoly to me. [1] https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings#tab_search_share/ https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings#tab_search_share/
• green1 7y ago
  There is no way Google doesn't use fingerprinting, or something even more advanced/creepy. I never sign into Google, use private browsing by default and use VPNs (not to hide, just for various location reasons), and Youtube's recommended for you is full of stuff unrelated the current video I'm watching that I've seen before with different IPs and locations/VPNs. Edit: LMAO at the sudden attempt to bury this post with 5 downvotes in just the last few minutes, like nobody has ever pointed this out before?
  • creato 7y ago
    Funny, my personal anecdote on this topic is that when I'm not signed in to my youtube account, I think all of the videos on my homepage and recommended videos are useless trash that make me embarrassed for humanity.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    As another person who works at Google, I'm pretty sure we don't do this. There's obviously no way I could know for certain. It's a big company. There could be some secret part of the organization that does shady stuff in the shadows. As far as your concerns go, YouTube is still somewhat separated. I can't really speak for Google. I have almost no clue what YouTube is doing. But, this sounds more like a coincidence or actually how recommendation systems are designed to work. Perhaps the content is popular in general, popular in the area, or what you think is unrelated -- statistically -- actually isn't. If you're watching videos with not many views... you are one of the only people to watch those videos. The recommendation system is going to recommend videos of people that watched that video before -- which you'll have a strong weight to. After just a few videos, your previous views will start to get significant weight. It's just how stats works.
    • green1 7y ago
      Maybe Google is different (and this is not about ads), but I don't believe for one second that I'm being tracked on Youtube by anything other than fingerprinting (or some other method unrelated to IP and cookies). I don't even particularly care that much, but it's still creepy, and I'm genuinely surprised to see denials because I thought fingerprinting was pretty standard these days.
• throwawayy98121 7y ago
  Sad that such a blatant ad makes it to front page of HN. Not sure how much I trust Google, but I trust these guys even less. The blog is an emotional rant. Not a single example of Google breaking anti trust laws. Translation - instead of competing by making a better product, we want our competitors to be taken out by government.
  • eino 7y ago
    That Google doesn't break any anti-trust law is missing the point. The post doesn't say Google is illegal. It says even though legal, there are many issues with one source controlling all access to information. Every week we have posts about new products, often self-posted. If they're upvoted, it's that people find it interesting. Quite ironic writing the blog is an emotional rant (that I would disagree with, I find it quite argumented), while your whole comment is whining that people upvote things that you don't agree with.
• Animats 7y ago
  Perhaps what's needed is an antitrust breakup which forces Google to divest its ad business. They can then sell wholesale search to others, who can compete by monetizing it.
• enitihas 7y ago
  I don't get the point. Doesn't the world already have search engines. Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo. If the argument is these are not popular, then that is surely not Google's fault. If the argument is Google's brand is more entrenched in the minds of consumers, then it applies to all sorts of companies and everything should be broken up, like Coke, since the world needs more sugar water. Search engines, unlike social networks, have much less network effects. Even if your family is using Google, you can use duck duck go. That's not the case if they use iMessage or Facebook. If you aren't using the same platform you might be cut off.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    I agree mostly, but there's a little more to it. Google Search is pretty well embedded into Android. You can use Baidu or Yandex or Bing / DuckDuckGo on an Android phone, but there's substantially more friction. Considering mobile is now more than 50% of search traffic and Android is 80% of devices, that's close to 40% of all searches basically going to Google for free. Combine that with the fact that Google is embedded into Chrome -- which is used by ~67% of web traffic -- and there's SOME friction to using a different search engine: You have to set your default to a different search engine, or go directly to that page, rather than just type into your URL bar -- like most people do. It's not hard to see that Google has a huge advantage.
    • surajrmal 7y ago
      The 80% assume China, but almost no phone in China has integrations with Google search. I don't mean to invalidate you're overall point though.
    • enitihas 7y ago
      Why do you think Google is embedded into Chrome? I use ddg easily with chrome, and as far as I remember, chrome allows you to change your search engine to anything, even a nobody site, as oppposed to Safari, which only allows selection from a fixed list of 4 on my Mac, so I can't use Yandex as my default. Desktop is dominated by windows, where bing search is embedded in the start menu, from where it is non trivial to remove it, and changing it to something else is not even possible. How is there more friction on using another search engine on Android. What other platform has an even lower friction in switching search engines?
• phendrenad2 7y ago
  Search engines are really a relic from back when everyone had their own webpage. Now everyone posts their content on a handful* of sites - Medium, Reddit, StackOverflow. I think what we need is an inversion of the search engine model... instead of a web crawler scouring the web for new pages, these handful of companies (Medium, Reddit, thousands more) should register with the search engines and push sitemaps regularly. This is the only way to level the playing field with Google, since the internet is so vast now that only Google/Microsoft/Yandex can afford the server/bandwidth fees to crawl it. *- and by "handful" I mean tens of thousands of sites, which is relatively small.
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    > Now everyone posts their content on a handful of sites - Medium, Reddit, StackOverflow. They do not and it would be a sad day if they did. Please don’t help push us towards that any further.
    • buboard 7y ago
      They do though. Old content will just gradually disappear into webarchive. Let's not pretend it didnt happen. (oh and btw we will probably change that again, but the content won't go into webpages-hosted-somewhere but probably will be served directly from the user's phne)
      • Avamander 7y ago
        Only if it's common knowledge. I've legit started to add "blog" to my searches to find more obscure knowledge.
        • edjroot 7y ago
          Don't forget that "it seems that Google is forgetting the old web": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604135
          • 7y ago
• uglygoblin 7y ago
  I'm all for more search engines but I'm not a fan of the brand name Cliqz. I instantly think of the bogus/low quality search results on a parked webpage.
• Darth_Hobo 7y ago
  I think people should be responsible for their actions. If they only use google without even trying anything else then they are themselves to blame for whatever bias/lies google have fed them. And asking me to pay yet another tax for regulations so that dumb people are protected from the consequences of their actions is... it's like they are trying to build a kindergarten for adults. And I am not a fan of socialism.
  • MamaJumba 7y ago
    Even if the consequences of the dumb people's actions indirectly (or directly) affect your life?
    • Darth_Hobo 7y ago
      Yes. If I put myself in the position where I am heavily dependent on what they do then I have only myself to blame. And if it is a minor dependency then I probably won't even care. And if you are talking about them doing violence then bullets are cheap.
• cj 7y ago
  Side note: > In the TV world, this would be the equivalent of 100 different channels, but they all show Fox News 24 hours a day and just replace the logo. This clearly cannot be good. Unfortunately that's already happening, just look at Sinclair [0]. They operate 193 different TV news stations covering 40% of US households and syndicate very similar content between stations (with the same political biases, just different logos). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group
  • toast0 7y ago
    How much of that is syndication (using the same news stories in different local markets) vs whatever you would call having two channels in the same market with the same content, but trying to market themselves as different?
• JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  I don't think it's possible to convince people that viable alternatives exist. I've been aware of them for years, and never considered using them once. They have the stigma of just being not as good. Having more search engines does nothing if nobody will use them-- Google's hegemony remains if there's n or 100n other search engines, if none of them can provide quality results reliably.
  • ben_jones 7y ago
    Did that stigma not exist for IBM? Microsoft? Oracle? If the crux of Google is an outdated reputation they'll have to invest more and more to maintain it until it consumes them and somebody else steps up.
• anon1m0us 7y ago
  How do I make this my default search engine as for when I type something into my address bar like I can with Google, Bing, or DDG?
• brentis 7y ago
  Google does everything it can to either have the first click or second click result in a paid event. Videos and related searches are clear examples of the abuse. True content is buried or listed in a row or two out of 10 plus results. Mobile is even more flagrant. Inswitch engines, just to get a less mainstream and digested view of my queries.
• kwhitefoot 7y ago
  Cliqz gives me two choices for UI language, neither of which I speak, though I can read a little. It gives me three choices of search area: USA, Germany, France. I would prefer the UI in English and I want hits from wherever they may be found not restricted to some small area. Good try, but some way to go.
• mac_was 7y ago
  Why is duckduckgo not mentioned at all?
• ChuckMcM 7y ago
  Because you can inject your ad network (https://myoffrz.com/en/fuer-nutzer/ https://myoffrz.com/en/fuer-nutzer/) more easily if you have your own search engine, people like Google don't let you use your own ads on their results generally. I don't disagree with the premise, after all I was part of a team that tried to do the same thing (well, without the ad network) and discovered that the adtech business has become so corrupt (not that it is all corrupt just that enough of it is) that the only way to cover the costs of running the thousand or so machines you need to hold a decent index and cache is hard to achieve.
  • Karrot_Kream 7y ago
    Curious what you mean by "corrupt" here. I'm genuinely curious as I've never worked at a company in ad-tech before, so it's always fascinating got me to hear from insiders.
    • ChuckMcM 7y ago
      Ad networks that push adware or malware that facilitate click fraud. I would guess that anywhere from 2 to 3 billion dollars spent on Internet advertising each year is ending up in the hands of corrupt ad tech vendors.
• dana321 7y ago
  I've built a few different types of search engines over the years. The first attempt was in 1999, i built a meta search engine using coldfusion.. I didn't have any server to run it on so it was on my dialup running locally. Worked pretty well, i was a big fan of metacrawler at the time. The next time was back in around 2003.. I had a server running on my adsl connection at the time. I wrote a crawler of sorts that indexed word positions to search by proximity. At the time, Google didn't do this, it was a feature i was looking for. Eventually, the project died. If i had a 200k startup fund like google had, it could have probably turned into something. I did build it on mysql and perl but it needed more servers.. Something i didn't really understand back then with only about 4 years web experience. Then, i built another a meta search engine, ran it on a hosted server, gained some limited traction around 2011. Died as the sources for the api dried up or became too costly. It did make some money from advertising at the time, which is a pretty big deal. The coolest thing was the fact that i kept the searches open, each search had an rss feed that you could use to keep track of certain keyword sets. Something i need to say about Google is this: it seems simple, but there is a lot going on in the background. Its doing a lot of things like checking for malware, spam, link farms, etc. but also its running the page in a real browser. Its pulling in data from google analytics and clickthrough/bounce rates, its always split-testing result sets, showing results based upon geographic location, language recognition, date recognition, etc. They use machine learning with real humans training those models, that's not to mention their internal systems for managing servers. I think you shouldn't try and copy what they are doing, in the end it doesn't matter if you do.. Look at bing, its kind of like a joke compared to Google. Facebook did the right thing, that was to bring the community and data onto the site itself. Identity is the future. Reddit is pretty good as well, you can talk about any link on the internet. User-moderated content is the future, as AI/ML can always fool another AI/ML but not a human. You only have to look at this site hacker news to tell that.
• garaetjjte 7y ago
  It's hard to take their "privacy by design" seriously. It is the same Cliqz that partnered before with Mozilla to run "experiment" exfiltrating browsing history (!) of 1% of new installs in Germany: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i... I thought Mozilla would loss all their credibility after this, but somehow they still market as privacy-focused..
  • tschakkaMarc 7y ago
    Hi, Marc from Cliqz. This one haunts us (in HN and also in my dreams). Let's first get one thing clear: It was a terrible blog post. Second: The 1% who had Cliqz installed were actually safer than the ones without. Why? If you use a (most) browsers every keystroke in the URL bar gets send to Google. This is how autosuggest works. This was and is the case with Firefox also. Cliqz in the functionally implemented in Firefox was not that different. Except - it comes with privacy by design: We actually proxied those requests to not get the IP, we take special measures to not collect private data in the first place. And all this was tested and scrutinized a lot before and after the test. And if you don't trust it or believe it, it also happened to be open source. In the end, you were better off with Cliqz than without. Third (and maybe most importantly): If you don't support anyone who "collects" data, even if they do it in the most transparent way, without collecting any private information, in fact going a long way to delete all PII, open-source and with privacy by design, someone who has no business model built on collecting profiles, then you only criticize Google, but will never have an alternative or only alternatives that white label those that do collect all data. Because building a search without data is impossible. We were hoping that together with Firefox we would build a better solution. For some reasons this didn't work out, but lack of privacy was never one of them (lack of a business model more so, because sending every key press to some is more profitable than others, regardless of how private each is). In fact, our way of doing things is much more private than most people out there who claim to be private. This includes most browsers and search engines. And all of this is open source, so verifiable. And while we speak about it: In our blog https://0x65.dev https://0x65.dev we will over the next 24 days publish pieces on what we do and why we do it and why it is important, data collection and anonymization will be a big part of this. Last not least: All this is clearly not your fault, so my rant might be inappropriate, but as I said, this thing haunts us for the wrong reasons. (Me and the team are happy to answer any questions).
• ravenstine 7y ago
  There already are other search engines, but most people view Google as god and infallible in it's results. Even tin foil hat wearing people I know who hate Google the company refuse to not use Google.
• iisi_ 7y ago
  Is that username a Sesame Street reference? Feeling goatly?
• ghjyui 7y ago
  You guys are polishing the steam engine, while we need some real progress. Typing a search query isn't much better than typing a SQL query. This should be the last resort thing. We need a service that would organize the information for us. Instead of us telling the service what we want to see, the service should tell us what's worth attention. Some people care about NFL, so they would be given the most valuable news about NFL. Others care about superconductors, so the service presents them a daily summary of most important advances there.
• Kaiyou 7y ago
  As far as I remember there's Google, there's Bing, something that only works with Chinese, something that only works with Russian, search engines that barely work at all and a bunch of meta search engines, that use Google or Bing or both at the same time under the hood, like DDG, Searx, Startpage, etc. So yeah, I'm down for more search engines. If there wasn't only one dominant one, SEO wouldn't be such a problem, either, I imagine.
• mThumbnail 7y ago
  Search engines are not just about quality of results. A reason to use Google is that it's what everyone else uses, so by using it you also get for free a picture of what kind of results everyone else is getting
• seektable 7y ago
  We don't need more search engines like google, we need a new kind of engines that will supersede google/bing/etc and break the following axioms: * search engine is a cloud service, which is not controlled by user of that engine * search gives final results in milliseconds (why? because google cannot spend many seconds/minutes for you, that's why) * search creates information bubble (that user cannot control) because it tires to satisfy user's expectations Most likely this new 'google-killer' will be: * open source, because user should trust the code * self-hosted (easily deployed in a click), not a cloud SaaS. Our search preferences have ultimate value, no one should have an access to it * more useful than google because of accumulated data about you that are processed by computational knowledge engine (something like WolframAlpha) * background reasoning - this engine can work continuously and utilize your own computational resources on notebook/PC and bring you brand new search insights that google never will be able to deliver (because they cannot dedicate a lot of computational resources for each google user). Sounds good, isn't it?.. Maybe this kind of software already exists, could someone point me out?
  • biasedOpinion 7y ago
    Disclaimer: I work at Google so I'm 100% biased. All opinions are my own. Edit: formatting >search engine is a cloud service, which is not controlled by user of that engine So is hacker news. >search gives final results in milliseconds (why? because google cannot spend many seconds/minutes for you, that's why) Do you want latency to be larger?? >open source, because user should trust the code That would make it easier for SEOs to game the system. Or perhaps it would put everyone on a level playing field. I'm not sure. >self-hosted (easily deployed in a click), not a cloud SaaS. Do you mean users should keep their own index of the whole web by themselves? >more useful than google because of accumulated data about you that are processed by computational knowledge engine First I think you greatly overestimate how useful information about you can be. Second if that worked then it would make they problem you mentioned before (information bubble) worse...
    • seektable 7y ago
      > Do you want latency to be larger?? Instant results are good for sure, however very often few more seconds - in addition to instant results! - is not a problem if late, more carefully processed results can save minutes of my time - for now I spend it for opening the links and scanning the content with my eyes. The same is about not very often but important searches that may be described as 'research about something', in this case I'm ready to make complex, well detailed query and wait even hours - then back and get well organized and intelligent results. > Do you mean users should keep their own index of the whole web by themselves? oh no! Users should keep only their personal data - in wide meaning, this includes all history of searches, search results, refinements, anything that ML currently uses to bring personal search experience. In addition to that, relatively small index of important content may be saved. For internet search this 'personal search' will use API of anything that can be used manually for now - google, bing, consume direct API of Twitter/FB/Medium/WolframAlpha and hundreds of connectors to other cloud services. It is important to say, that this 'delegated search calls' may be anonymized. It will be important that search results are not limited only by what google decided to be 'top results for this user'. At this moment I can do all this manually - open N tabs, query many services, compare results, open most 'relevant' (from my human point of view, not google) links and scan them for most interesting information. I believe that all this can be automated. > First I think you greatly overestimate how useful information about you can be. Second if that worked then it would make they problem you mentioned before (information bubble) worse... As for now, all this just thoughts. I'm a programmer with almost 20YOE; I have understanding about how google works in general, how lucene works, how WolframAlpha works, modern approaches to NLP and search-driven queries processing, and I think - without a MVP that works, this is more belief, of course - that value of this 'personal computation engine' combined with modern ML approaches might be ultimate. Challenge, but nothing impossible!
• 21xhipster 7y ago
  Proposed design is flawed. The same as Google. Check our proposal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21678527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21678527
• CivBase 7y ago
  I love DDG. In my experience, Google still usually does a better job but DDG is good enough 90% of the time and bang searches make it trivial to handle that remaining 10%. I recognize that there is still room to improve DDG's search quality. However, I wonder if DDG or any competitor can ever get as good as Google without collecting user data and using that to contextualize searches.
• rotrux 7y ago
  The world needs more ways to navigate the internet is what it needs. An intuitive tool that helps me stay on track and/or helps me remember what the hell I did would be preferable. The mystery-box-that-reads-my-mind-then-poops-out-links model feels increasingly clumsy as the years go by.
• Uptrenda 7y ago
  Wow, they managed to build a Google competitor that doesn't suck. This is actually pretty crazy. I never thought there would be new innovation in the search space. I'll be using this from now on.
• LuNan 7y ago
  You complain about Google because you haven't use Baidu in China. If you have used baidu, you will know that Google is much better!
• jstein93 7y ago
  The unbundling of google is happening. There needs to be better document search.
• edisonjoao 7y ago
  lot of facts