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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 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.
- MrGilbert 6y ago
  Well, it's Chromium, and that's the caveat: In the past, there has been at least one DRM-related issue[1], which needed to be resolved by - Google, because they own Widevine. So you need your competitor to be able to provide an adequate product. Let's say that's kind of subpar. [1]: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10449 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10449
throwaway914892 6y ago
Not sure what happened to my comment. It was a reply to the discussion below about Brave. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23032085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23032085
solso 6y ago
Just for archive reasons. There are some interesting points worth addressing (IMHO). Of course I worked at Cliqz :-) "The company only survived because of the investor throw a lot of money". 100% correct, and that speaks greatly about the investor. They believe that Google is a monopoly that needs to fought, as many others. But, instead of (or on top of) bitching and moaning, lobbying, etc. they put good money where their mouth was. Kudos for that. Privacy was never Cliqz primary product. Privacy was a strict design requirement of Cliqz, which can be marketed more or less. Data collection and browsers alike, we wanted them to be private, because that's the right thing to do, even if it was more difficult to implement. The whole data vs. privacy argument is fallacious. One of the reasons why privacy was so important to us is precisely now, whoever ends up owning the data cannot learn anything about any of the users. Imagine the government getting Google's data if they go belly up or upon "legal" request (change Google by any other company). The data of Cliqz poses no risk to any user, including myself. The primary product of Cliqz was search, either as the typical result page or instant search integrated on the browser. That's very difficult to build, and expensive, something that DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Qwant, etc. do not have to pay because they rely on the backend of others (not 100%, but mostly). If we were repackaging Bing/Google/Yandex with a different ranking twists, our quality would have been better from the beginning, of course. But that's not building an alternative to Google, which is what we wanted. Still, that's not a pun to DDG and others, what they provide has value to the users, of course. But they are not real alternative, kind of an electric car that gets its electricity from burning coal. Brave is a great browser, respects to Brendan and team. We both "fight" against Google. For Brave it's Chrome, for Cliqz was both Chrome and Search. Too much to chew? Yes, but we had plenty of fun. The only thing I regret after +6 years working there is the loss of such a great team.
- jszymborski 6y ago
  Did Cliqz ever consider bootstrapping with Bing/Google/Yandex results? Supplement Cliqz results with those backends until Cliqz results got as good as you wanted them to be? I'll always support privacy conscious search engines (I'm a DDG daily user), but Cliqz didn't really feel like an option to me because of quality degradation (and this is coming from a person who puts up with manually approving JS with uMatrix on each page I visit).

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.

MrGilbert 6y ago
Well, it's Chromium, and that's the caveat: In the past, there has been at least one DRM-related issue[1], which needed to be resolved by - Google, because they own Widevine. So you need your competitor to be able to provide an adequate product. Let's say that's kind of subpar. [1]: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10449 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10449

throwaway914892 6y ago

Not sure what happened to my comment. It was a reply to the discussion below about Brave. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23032085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23032085

solso 6y ago

Just for archive reasons. There are some interesting points worth addressing (IMHO). Of course I worked at Cliqz :-) "The company only survived because of the investor throw a lot of money". 100% correct, and that speaks greatly about the investor. They believe that Google is a monopoly that needs to fought, as many others. But, instead of (or on top of) bitching and moaning, lobbying, etc. they put good money where their mouth was. Kudos for that. Privacy was never Cliqz primary product. Privacy was a strict design requirement of Cliqz, which can be marketed more or less. Data collection and browsers alike, we wanted them to be private, because that's the right thing to do, even if it was more difficult to implement. The whole data vs. privacy argument is fallacious. One of the reasons why privacy was so important to us is precisely now, whoever ends up owning the data cannot learn anything about any of the users. Imagine the government getting Google's data if they go belly up or upon "legal" request (change Google by any other company). The data of Cliqz poses no risk to any user, including myself. The primary product of Cliqz was search, either as the typical result page or instant search integrated on the browser. That's very difficult to build, and expensive, something that DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Qwant, etc. do not have to pay because they rely on the backend of others (not 100%, but mostly). If we were repackaging Bing/Google/Yandex with a different ranking twists, our quality would have been better from the beginning, of course. But that's not building an alternative to Google, which is what we wanted. Still, that's not a pun to DDG and others, what they provide has value to the users, of course. But they are not real alternative, kind of an electric car that gets its electricity from burning coal. Brave is a great browser, respects to Brendan and team. We both "fight" against Google. For Brave it's Chrome, for Cliqz was both Chrome and Search. Too much to chew? Yes, but we had plenty of fun. The only thing I regret after +6 years working there is the loss of such a great team.

jszymborski 6y ago
Did Cliqz ever consider bootstrapping with Bing/Google/Yandex results? Supplement Cliqz results with those backends until Cliqz results got as good as you wanted them to be? I'll always support privacy conscious search engines (I'm a DDG daily user), but Cliqz didn't really feel like an option to me because of quality degradation (and this is coming from a person who puts up with manually approving JS with uMatrix on each page I visit).