9 ms·

Cliqz is shutting down

106 points by kenty 6y ago

ddevault 6y ago
Good riddance. "Privacy-oriented" is the most egregious tagline I've ever seen from a company like Cliqz. Their real motus operandi was spying on users for targeted ads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox
- dontbenebby 6y ago
  Wow, I came in to joke we know DuckDuckGo must be doing well if it's killing competitors but sheesh. It amazes me so many companies (not just privacy oriented) don't think the ground truth of having a useful product which treats users with respect is necessary in order to be successful.
- smnthermes 6y ago
  It's the greatest shame in the Firefox history.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  Agreed 100%. The article presents a whitewashed rose-tinted picture of Cliqz that's very different from reality, and it's alarming that its (former) employees continue to propagate that reality distortion even beyond the existence of Cliqz itself. The browser and search engine were a front for the "offers", plain and simple. The whole premise was Orwellian to its core; war was peace, freedom was slavery, ignorance was strength, and tracking was privacy. I sympathize with the newly-displaced employees facing the grim prospects of finding work in a fractured labor market. Hopefully they'll all have a chance to put their skills toward more honest ventures.
itcrowd 6y ago
> Some of the back-burner [marketing] ideas were: Changing the Cliqz name, turning the browser colors to pick for Valentine’s day, advertising on porn websites (okay, that one made it). This must be a joke, right? Who the heck installs a browser (extension) that advertises on a porn website? Changing the Cliqz name would have been WAY better. Cliqz sounds super shady and I would never have guessed it was a search engine. To me this product sounds like one of those toolbars in web browsers years ago.
- rjkennedy98 6y ago
  It makes total sense for a privacy-oriented to advertise there. It's the same reason VPNs advertise on pirate bay.
skyfaller 6y ago
I'm sorry to see this, I was looking forward to their Android web browser that intended to support the Dat protocol: - https://github.com/cliqz/cliqz-concept-browser https://github.com/cliqz/cliqz-concept-browser - https://github.com/cliqz/daisy https://github.com/cliqz/daisy I love Beaker Browser and its vision for a P2P web, but it hasn't had a major release in a while (despite seemingly having active development) and it appears it will be desktop-only for the foreseeable future. I don't think Dat will have much uptake until there is a solid browser on both desktop and mobile. (There was also the Bunsen browser trying to support Dat on Android, but it seems to be abandonware and I was never able to get it working anyway: https://github.com/bunsenbrowser/bunsen/ https://github.com/bunsenbrowser/bunsen/ )
- pfraze 6y ago
  Beaker's going to finally release a new version in ~2 weeks. No solution to the mobile browser yet, but I hope somebody will pick up the mantle from Cliqz and Busnen.
dessant 6y ago
> Cliqz lost the fight against Google. There’s no way to sugarcoat this. > A cynic might say that Cliqz failed because of our strong passion for technology and a missing drive from business development. A cynic might also say that you were dishonest and masqueraded as something different than what your business model represented, so people had no compelling reason to switch over from Google, which does a much better job at offering quality products and deceiving its users. I hope Brave Browser is next. Brave is the kind of company that exploits people's desire for privacy to become a rent seeker for creators and publishers, sprinkled with some crypto tokens as bait.
- mixedCase 6y ago
  And yet I just use Brave because it's a nice Chromium fork with actually useful built in anti-tracking tools and a focus on privacy that has been proven in detail by other people by simply sniffing network calls. I don't use BAT (at least right now). I use Patreon which is a "rent seeker", or in other words someone providing a service for a fee for handling transactions without me having to physically go to the other person and give him money, and I find that very useful. So I don't see what the issue is with it even if I don't care about it.
- zynkb0a 6y ago
  I am also not quite ready to concede that a Chrome/Blink base is the only way a browser can be successful. I'm sure the day is coming, and I'm not sure that we can ever go back when it does.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  The problem with Brave is that they're curing the symptom (people disliking and/or blocking ads), not the disease (the current state of advertising itself). Let's assume they hypothetically succeed and Brave's BAT-powered ad platform is the only thing available, they'll then have the exact same problem of fraud as the current ad industry and will need to deploy invasive tracking in an attempt to curb it, without success. The problem is that the advertising model of "attention" is broken to begin with. Even without malicious intentions, how do you determine the value of attention? Is it "cheating" to look away or mute when an ad is shown? Is it cheating if you're looking at an ad in a foreign language you don't understand? Is it cheating if you're watching a video in bed and fall asleep by the time the ad is shown? Is it cheating to be looking at ads intentionally (because someone like Brave is paying you in tokens) without having any intention of buying the advertised products? In my opinion the solution is to not base advertising on "attention" but base it on real results, aka the advertised product/service making more sales. Make the ads time-based ("your ad will be shown here for the next 2 weeks") and then the whole idea of tracking or fraud goes away because the only result is whether you're making more sales, and if so then it doesn't matter whether real people are looking at the ads or bots are "looking" at them because the advertisement is delivering results. This is how advertising has been done for a century in traditional media like print and TV.
dorkwood 6y ago
Up until a certain threshold, I think company names are unimportant and one can succeed despite having a silly name. But once a company steps over that threshold with a name like "Cliqz", it becomes difficult to overcome the embarrassment you're generating whenever someone has to read or say your company name out loud. A common argument I've seen used to defend bad names is "Google and Twitter have silly names, and they succeeded!" Well, I was there when those companies first came on the scene, and I didn't find their names embarrassing, so there's a difference between silly and embarrassing, I believe.
- robotnikman 6y ago
  Cliqz sounds like a name of a toy marketed to girls.
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  The name and the logo and the front lobby photo had me convinced it was some fashion or salon type business. I do remember "iPad" sounding just bizarre. Now it's household.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  Cliqz sounds like an adware/spyware company from the late 90's / early 00's. Except instead of a purple gorilla, we got a web browser.
heipei 6y ago
For what it's worth, their engineering blog about how to build a large-scale search engine more or less from scratch was really interesting: https://0x65.dev/ https://0x65.dev/
- prox 6y ago
  Weren’t there a bunch of posts on HN by them?
  - chris_f 6y ago
    Yeah, I believe in December they did a post a day. A lot of the posts made it to the front page.
throwaway914892 6y ago
Cliqz was a hypocritical product right from the start, and it never attracted a large userbase. The only reason it survived that long because the company behind Cliqz didn't care about throwing lots of money into the idea of creating a competition to google. Second, the product doesn't provide any practical benefit to google users, so there is no point to switch. Cliqz didn't realize that you can't sell privacy as a primary product. Privacy is always a secondary attribute to a real product. That's why DuckDuckGo is succesful. It profits from the increasing privacy-awareness, but people use it because it both works and respects privacy. Brave is far from perfect, and to a certain extent it is indeed hypocritical. Brave sells us the idea of decentralization, even though in practice there is no decentralization at all. Other than that, you can't compare Cliqz with Brave, and here's the reason why Brave will not fail: - First and firemost, they have a consistent monthly growth in their userbase for years - In contrast to Cliqz who pushes their own products via Ghostery, Brave acts as a neutral middleman, thus creating a direct competition with Google et al., who are also middlemen. In other words, Brave offers every customer the same opportunity to serve ads - An innovative and unique product: The monthly growth proves this point, as innovation leads to demand. - user first ideology: Even though Brave wants to be a middleman for a privacy-preserving money-flow between creators and users, they allow the user to chose whether to activate it or not. By default, Brave is just a browser that blocks annoying and privacy-infringing stuff. With Cliqz it is basically impossible to get the Cliqz out of the browser, with Brave I can change my browser in a way as to never see anything related to ads, crypto tokens, etc. and Brave actively respects that decision. As long as Brave respects users like me who deactivate everything in the browser related to ads and crypto schemes, they will continue to have a loyal userbase behind them.
- Proven 6y ago
  You can't deactivate the occasional ad in new (empty) Brave tab, can you?
- judge2020 6y ago
  In fewer words, Brave won't fail because their "product that works" is Chrome.
tpmx 6y ago
Wow. From that team photo alone it looks like they had ~100 employees. I've never even heard of this company, and I'm still sorta tuned into the browser business, and based in Europe. Where did they get the money to hire ~100 people? Edit: Ah. They got their money from a german media group struggling to stay relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Burda_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Burda_Media
- r721 6y ago
  Some of their posts were quite popular on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=0x65.dev https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=0x65.dev
pmontra 6y ago
I'm a little sad about it. I've been using Cliqz from the browser search bar for a few months only because it's not Google. I'm probably switching to DDG now. The search engine kind of works, but years behind Google. The most annoying missing feature is no "exact terms" search, which is a problem when googling error messages. All considered I pressed the Google button at the bottom maybe half of the times, and I bet very few people would stick to such a search engine. > Cliqz failed because of our strong passion for technology and a missing drive from business development I don't know about Cliqz but this is generally true. We developers do a great job building (oh well) but if somebody doesn't do an even greater job at selling the outcome won't be good. The importance of selling vs building is 80-20 IMHO.
- chris_f 6y ago
  Just wrote this today, specifically regarding your exact search issue. Seems like a timely share with the Cliqz news. https://www.runnaroo.com/blog/the-search-engine-hacker-news-has-been-asking-for https://www.runnaroo.com/blog/the-search-engine-hacker-news-...
- chispamed 6y ago
  If you are searching for privacy-focused Google seaarch alternatives and are not happy with DDG, you may want to give Qwant (https://www.qwant.com https://www.qwant.com, best one regarding privacy I've found so far but since the quarantine began it's been a bit slow) or Startpage (https://startpage.com https://startpage.com, they actually show you google results) a try as well.
  - hellcow 6y ago
    Startpage was acquired by an ad company: https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company/ https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company/.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
chris_f 6y ago
I spent a good amount of time using Cliqz. For creating their own search index, it was pretty good. But it was nowhere near as good as Google or Bing, and to the average end-user that's all that matters. Most people don't really care about the engineering behind a tool, they just want the tool to work. The company name never bothered me, but from the comments it looks like I'm in the minority there. Is it any worse than DuckDuckGo? If you are looking for another search engine with their own search index, also check out Mojeek. https://www.mojeek.com/ https://www.mojeek.com/
- onli 6y ago
  The search really wasn't bad. I made some test searches and wrote a small article about it, comparing the results. Cliqz did really well in it. Not everything was perfect, but neither was Google. I was impressed enough to use them as my own search engine and that worked just fine. Sure, sometimes necessary to switch over, but that's the same with ddg. I would have loved to see how they'd perform in a few years. And while I don't like some political positions of the backing publisher they had: It is true that Europe and Germany needs enterprises like that, companies that can be alternatives to the US tech giants. Not sure they should be publicly funded, but should they get support? Of course. Thanks for the link to Mojeek, seems worth a look. Btw, https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/farewell-from-cliqz https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/farewell-from-cliqz is maybe a more fitting link target for the submission with the current title (dang?).
smoyer 6y ago
I tried Cliqz for a day and didn't find the results useful (so I went back to DDG.)
bsder 6y ago
Can we please just get the old AltaVista graphical clustering back in a search engine? Please? Presumably the problem is monetizing it. I don't have good answers for that. Ads are obvious. However, that introduces the perverse incentives that everybody complains about.
MrGilbert 6y ago
Ok, so it's kind of difficult to compete with Google. I get that. How about building decentralized search engines? Basically ActivityPub, but for search engines. Any known efforts in this direction?
- thekyle 6y ago
  There is YaCy which has pretty terrible results but is P2P. There used to be a P2P search engine called FAROO that was better but seems to have been shutdown. I wrote a blog post comparing search results quality earlier this year. YaCy came in last, even behind Cliqz. https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has-the-best-results/ https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has...
  - MrGilbert 6y ago
    I remember YaCy, yes... I tried it once, and wasn't convinced. I mean, obviously, there is more to building a "search engine" than just a big fat searchable index. I think where Google shines is to understand what you mean, not what you wrote. This is a pretty complex task, I guess.
bzb3 6y ago
Remember the time Mozilla sent the full URL history of some users to Cliqz: 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... Farewell, au revoir.
Hoasi 6y ago
It is shutting down and this is the first time I even hear about it.
floatingatoll 6y ago
More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23043785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23043785

106 points by kenty 6y ago

Good riddance. "Privacy-oriented" is the most egregious tagline I've ever seen from a company like Cliqz. Their real motus operandi was spying on users for targeted ads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox

dontbenebby 6y ago
Wow, I came in to joke we know DuckDuckGo must be doing well if it's killing competitors but sheesh. It amazes me so many companies (not just privacy oriented) don't think the ground truth of having a useful product which treats users with respect is necessary in order to be successful.
smnthermes 6y ago
It's the greatest shame in the Firefox history.
yellowapple 6y ago
Agreed 100%. The article presents a whitewashed rose-tinted picture of Cliqz that's very different from reality, and it's alarming that its (former) employees continue to propagate that reality distortion even beyond the existence of Cliqz itself. The browser and search engine were a front for the "offers", plain and simple. The whole premise was Orwellian to its core; war was peace, freedom was slavery, ignorance was strength, and tracking was privacy. I sympathize with the newly-displaced employees facing the grim prospects of finding work in a fractured labor market. Hopefully they'll all have a chance to put their skills toward more honest ventures.

itcrowd 6y ago

> Some of the back-burner [marketing] ideas were: Changing the Cliqz name, turning the browser colors to pick for Valentine’s day, advertising on porn websites (okay, that one made it). This must be a joke, right? Who the heck installs a browser (extension) that advertises on a porn website? Changing the Cliqz name would have been WAY better. Cliqz sounds super shady and I would never have guessed it was a search engine. To me this product sounds like one of those toolbars in web browsers years ago.

rjkennedy98 6y ago
It makes total sense for a privacy-oriented to advertise there. It's the same reason VPNs advertise on pirate bay.

skyfaller 6y ago

I'm sorry to see this, I was looking forward to their Android web browser that intended to support the Dat protocol: - https://github.com/cliqz/cliqz-concept-browser https://github.com/cliqz/cliqz-concept-browser - https://github.com/cliqz/daisy https://github.com/cliqz/daisy I love Beaker Browser and its vision for a P2P web, but it hasn't had a major release in a while (despite seemingly having active development) and it appears it will be desktop-only for the foreseeable future. I don't think Dat will have much uptake until there is a solid browser on both desktop and mobile. (There was also the Bunsen browser trying to support Dat on Android, but it seems to be abandonware and I was never able to get it working anyway: https://github.com/bunsenbrowser/bunsen/ https://github.com/bunsenbrowser/bunsen/ )

pfraze 6y ago
Beaker's going to finally release a new version in ~2 weeks. No solution to the mobile browser yet, but I hope somebody will pick up the mantle from Cliqz and Busnen.

dessant 6y ago

> Cliqz lost the fight against Google. There’s no way to sugarcoat this. > A cynic might say that Cliqz failed because of our strong passion for technology and a missing drive from business development. A cynic might also say that you were dishonest and masqueraded as something different than what your business model represented, so people had no compelling reason to switch over from Google, which does a much better job at offering quality products and deceiving its users. I hope Brave Browser is next. Brave is the kind of company that exploits people's desire for privacy to become a rent seeker for creators and publishers, sprinkled with some crypto tokens as bait.

mixedCase 6y ago
And yet I just use Brave because it's a nice Chromium fork with actually useful built in anti-tracking tools and a focus on privacy that has been proven in detail by other people by simply sniffing network calls. I don't use BAT (at least right now). I use Patreon which is a "rent seeker", or in other words someone providing a service for a fee for handling transactions without me having to physically go to the other person and give him money, and I find that very useful. So I don't see what the issue is with it even if I don't care about it.
zynkb0a 6y ago
I am also not quite ready to concede that a Chrome/Blink base is the only way a browser can be successful. I'm sure the day is coming, and I'm not sure that we can ever go back when it does.
Nextgrid 6y ago
The problem with Brave is that they're curing the symptom (people disliking and/or blocking ads), not the disease (the current state of advertising itself). Let's assume they hypothetically succeed and Brave's BAT-powered ad platform is the only thing available, they'll then have the exact same problem of fraud as the current ad industry and will need to deploy invasive tracking in an attempt to curb it, without success. The problem is that the advertising model of "attention" is broken to begin with. Even without malicious intentions, how do you determine the value of attention? Is it "cheating" to look away or mute when an ad is shown? Is it cheating if you're looking at an ad in a foreign language you don't understand? Is it cheating if you're watching a video in bed and fall asleep by the time the ad is shown? Is it cheating to be looking at ads intentionally (because someone like Brave is paying you in tokens) without having any intention of buying the advertised products? In my opinion the solution is to not base advertising on "attention" but base it on real results, aka the advertised product/service making more sales. Make the ads time-based ("your ad will be shown here for the next 2 weeks") and then the whole idea of tracking or fraud goes away because the only result is whether you're making more sales, and if so then it doesn't matter whether real people are looking at the ads or bots are "looking" at them because the advertisement is delivering results. This is how advertising has been done for a century in traditional media like print and TV.

dorkwood 6y ago

Up until a certain threshold, I think company names are unimportant and one can succeed despite having a silly name. But once a company steps over that threshold with a name like "Cliqz", it becomes difficult to overcome the embarrassment you're generating whenever someone has to read or say your company name out loud. A common argument I've seen used to defend bad names is "Google and Twitter have silly names, and they succeeded!" Well, I was there when those companies first came on the scene, and I didn't find their names embarrassing, so there's a difference between silly and embarrassing, I believe.

robotnikman 6y ago
Cliqz sounds like a name of a toy marketed to girls.
Waterluvian 6y ago
The name and the logo and the front lobby photo had me convinced it was some fashion or salon type business. I do remember "iPad" sounding just bizarre. Now it's household.
yellowapple 6y ago
Cliqz sounds like an adware/spyware company from the late 90's / early 00's. Except instead of a purple gorilla, we got a web browser.

heipei 6y ago

For what it's worth, their engineering blog about how to build a large-scale search engine more or less from scratch was really interesting: https://0x65.dev/ https://0x65.dev/

prox 6y ago
Weren’t there a bunch of posts on HN by them?
- chris_f 6y ago
  Yeah, I believe in December they did a post a day. A lot of the posts made it to the front page.

throwaway914892 6y ago

Cliqz was a hypocritical product right from the start, and it never attracted a large userbase. The only reason it survived that long because the company behind Cliqz didn't care about throwing lots of money into the idea of creating a competition to google. Second, the product doesn't provide any practical benefit to google users, so there is no point to switch. Cliqz didn't realize that you can't sell privacy as a primary product. Privacy is always a secondary attribute to a real product. That's why DuckDuckGo is succesful. It profits from the increasing privacy-awareness, but people use it because it both works and respects privacy. Brave is far from perfect, and to a certain extent it is indeed hypocritical. Brave sells us the idea of decentralization, even though in practice there is no decentralization at all. Other than that, you can't compare Cliqz with Brave, and here's the reason why Brave will not fail: - First and firemost, they have a consistent monthly growth in their userbase for years - In contrast to Cliqz who pushes their own products via Ghostery, Brave acts as a neutral middleman, thus creating a direct competition with Google et al., who are also middlemen. In other words, Brave offers every customer the same opportunity to serve ads - An innovative and unique product: The monthly growth proves this point, as innovation leads to demand. - user first ideology: Even though Brave wants to be a middleman for a privacy-preserving money-flow between creators and users, they allow the user to chose whether to activate it or not. By default, Brave is just a browser that blocks annoying and privacy-infringing stuff. With Cliqz it is basically impossible to get the Cliqz out of the browser, with Brave I can change my browser in a way as to never see anything related to ads, crypto tokens, etc. and Brave actively respects that decision. As long as Brave respects users like me who deactivate everything in the browser related to ads and crypto schemes, they will continue to have a loyal userbase behind them.

Proven 6y ago
You can't deactivate the occasional ad in new (empty) Brave tab, can you?
judge2020 6y ago
In fewer words, Brave won't fail because their "product that works" is Chrome.

tpmx 6y ago

Wow. From that team photo alone it looks like they had ~100 employees. I've never even heard of this company, and I'm still sorta tuned into the browser business, and based in Europe. Where did they get the money to hire ~100 people? Edit: Ah. They got their money from a german media group struggling to stay relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Burda_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Burda_Media

r721 6y ago
Some of their posts were quite popular on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=0x65.dev https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=0x65.dev

pmontra 6y ago

I'm a little sad about it. I've been using Cliqz from the browser search bar for a few months only because it's not Google. I'm probably switching to DDG now. The search engine kind of works, but years behind Google. The most annoying missing feature is no "exact terms" search, which is a problem when googling error messages. All considered I pressed the Google button at the bottom maybe half of the times, and I bet very few people would stick to such a search engine. > Cliqz failed because of our strong passion for technology and a missing drive from business development I don't know about Cliqz but this is generally true. We developers do a great job building (oh well) but if somebody doesn't do an even greater job at selling the outcome won't be good. The importance of selling vs building is 80-20 IMHO.

chris_f 6y ago
Just wrote this today, specifically regarding your exact search issue. Seems like a timely share with the Cliqz news. https://www.runnaroo.com/blog/the-search-engine-hacker-news-has-been-asking-for https://www.runnaroo.com/blog/the-search-engine-hacker-news-...
chispamed 6y ago
If you are searching for privacy-focused Google seaarch alternatives and are not happy with DDG, you may want to give Qwant (https://www.qwant.com https://www.qwant.com, best one regarding privacy I've found so far but since the quarantine began it's been a bit slow) or Startpage (https://startpage.com https://startpage.com, they actually show you google results) a try as well.
- hellcow 6y ago
  Startpage was acquired by an ad company: https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company/ https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company/.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

chris_f 6y ago

I spent a good amount of time using Cliqz. For creating their own search index, it was pretty good. But it was nowhere near as good as Google or Bing, and to the average end-user that's all that matters. Most people don't really care about the engineering behind a tool, they just want the tool to work. The company name never bothered me, but from the comments it looks like I'm in the minority there. Is it any worse than DuckDuckGo? If you are looking for another search engine with their own search index, also check out Mojeek. https://www.mojeek.com/ https://www.mojeek.com/

onli 6y ago
The search really wasn't bad. I made some test searches and wrote a small article about it, comparing the results. Cliqz did really well in it. Not everything was perfect, but neither was Google. I was impressed enough to use them as my own search engine and that worked just fine. Sure, sometimes necessary to switch over, but that's the same with ddg. I would have loved to see how they'd perform in a few years. And while I don't like some political positions of the backing publisher they had: It is true that Europe and Germany needs enterprises like that, companies that can be alternatives to the US tech giants. Not sure they should be publicly funded, but should they get support? Of course. Thanks for the link to Mojeek, seems worth a look. Btw, https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/farewell-from-cliqz https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/farewell-from-cliqz is maybe a more fitting link target for the submission with the current title (dang?).

smoyer 6y ago

I tried Cliqz for a day and didn't find the results useful (so I went back to DDG.)

bsder 6y ago

Can we please just get the old AltaVista graphical clustering back in a search engine? Please? Presumably the problem is monetizing it. I don't have good answers for that. Ads are obvious. However, that introduces the perverse incentives that everybody complains about.

MrGilbert 6y ago

Ok, so it's kind of difficult to compete with Google. I get that. How about building decentralized search engines? Basically ActivityPub, but for search engines. Any known efforts in this direction?

thekyle 6y ago
There is YaCy which has pretty terrible results but is P2P. There used to be a P2P search engine called FAROO that was better but seems to have been shutdown. I wrote a blog post comparing search results quality earlier this year. YaCy came in last, even behind Cliqz. https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has-the-best-results/ https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has...
- MrGilbert 6y ago
  I remember YaCy, yes... I tried it once, and wasn't convinced. I mean, obviously, there is more to building a "search engine" than just a big fat searchable index. I think where Google shines is to understand what you mean, not what you wrote. This is a pretty complex task, I guess.

bzb3 6y ago

Remember the time Mozilla sent the full URL history of some users to Cliqz: 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... Farewell, au revoir.

Hoasi 6y ago

It is shutting down and this is the first time I even hear about it.

floatingatoll 6y ago

More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23043785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23043785