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> 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

> 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.
solso 6y ago
Cliqz never masqueraded anything, only in your odd perception of the world. Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted. The same goes for data-collection, you can collect all and put the privacy of the users at risk, or collect only signals that cannot be record-linked, which is what Cliqz did. Cliqz search was never on par with Google -- I build parts of it -- but was getting there little by little. To be more precise, it was getting good enough, to not be a factor. That has some merit given the totally independent index (not relying on Bing under the hood). Brave the same as Cliqz are trying their best to offer an alternative. If you think you can do better, please do so. Believe, I'll root for you regardless of my opinion about you (we crossed path in the past). Why would I support you, even though that does not mean I use what you build? Because we are in need of having plurality on the Web, the more the better. Unlike you, I do not see the point of speaking bullshit, not sure if out of ignorance or ill-will, don't know, don't care.
- chris_f 6y ago
  In your experience, what was the biggest challenge to be on par with Google? From using Cliqz, I felt that the relevance of search results was fairly good. The challenge I had in many cases was that the coverage was so much less for non-common search terms that the information I was looking for just wasn't there. The Instant Answers on Google are also getting good to the point where sometimes I don't have to leave the SERP.
- dessant 6y ago
  Your employer being dishonest does not necessarily qualify you, so I'm not sure why it is being taken personally. There are also several incredibly talented people at Google who do awesome things, some even fight for human rights and privacy, but that does not absolve the atrocities Google as a company commits against the human race. Nor does your team's work on search engines absolve Cliqz of attempting to build a company that is based on pervasive user tracking, anonymized (deanonymizable in the future) or otherwise. I'd rather not address the rest of your personal attacks.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  > Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox: "According to the Firefox support website, this version of Firefox collects and sends data to the Cliqz corporation including text typed in the address bar, queries to other search engines, information about visited webpages and interactions with them including mouse movement, scrolling, and amount of time spent; and the user's interactions with the user interface of the Cliqz software. This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance." Yep, real "client-side", eh? Even if it was actually client-side, that's cold comfort; the data's still being collected and presumably persisted, and there's no telling whether or not some future software update will make that locally-stored data not-so-locally-stored anymore.

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.

solso 6y ago

Cliqz never masqueraded anything, only in your odd perception of the world. Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted. The same goes for data-collection, you can collect all and put the privacy of the users at risk, or collect only signals that cannot be record-linked, which is what Cliqz did. Cliqz search was never on par with Google -- I build parts of it -- but was getting there little by little. To be more precise, it was getting good enough, to not be a factor. That has some merit given the totally independent index (not relying on Bing under the hood). Brave the same as Cliqz are trying their best to offer an alternative. If you think you can do better, please do so. Believe, I'll root for you regardless of my opinion about you (we crossed path in the past). Why would I support you, even though that does not mean I use what you build? Because we are in need of having plurality on the Web, the more the better. Unlike you, I do not see the point of speaking bullshit, not sure if out of ignorance or ill-will, don't know, don't care.

chris_f 6y ago
In your experience, what was the biggest challenge to be on par with Google? From using Cliqz, I felt that the relevance of search results was fairly good. The challenge I had in many cases was that the coverage was so much less for non-common search terms that the information I was looking for just wasn't there. The Instant Answers on Google are also getting good to the point where sometimes I don't have to leave the SERP.
dessant 6y ago
Your employer being dishonest does not necessarily qualify you, so I'm not sure why it is being taken personally. There are also several incredibly talented people at Google who do awesome things, some even fight for human rights and privacy, but that does not absolve the atrocities Google as a company commits against the human race. Nor does your team's work on search engines absolve Cliqz of attempting to build a company that is based on pervasive user tracking, anonymized (deanonymizable in the future) or otherwise. I'd rather not address the rest of your personal attacks.
yellowapple 6y ago
> Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox: "According to the Firefox support website, this version of Firefox collects and sends data to the Cliqz corporation including text typed in the address bar, queries to other search engines, information about visited webpages and interactions with them including mouse movement, scrolling, and amount of time spent; and the user's interactions with the user interface of the Cliqz software. This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance." Yep, real "client-side", eh? Even if it was actually client-side, that's cold comfort; the data's still being collected and presumably persisted, and there's no telling whether or not some future software update will make that locally-stored data not-so-locally-stored anymore.