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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

by 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).
- solso 6y ago
  Yes, but once you have such a strong dependency it's difficult to remove it. Others have tried the approach and are still stuck with them. Sorry to hear that the quality was not good for you, it depends on country to country (depending on the users-base basically). For Germany, quality was good enough, QA analysis on stratified queries backed it up. That being said, perceived quality from a person is not properly reflected on NDCG-like metrics, you do not remember the 9 queries it did right, but the one that was totally off. In any case, DDG is good, and let me emphasize, they (and others) provide a lot of value to the users, privacy-concerned or otherwise. But the underlying problem is not getting fixed, unless, hopefully someday, they come up with an independent index (let's hope).
yellowapple 6y ago
> Brave is a great browser, respects to Brendan and team. We both "fight" against Google. Using Google's browser as the basis for one's own browser is certainly an interesting way to "fight" against Google. Much like how collecting ad performance / analytics data from users is an interesting way to achieve privacy as a "strict design requirement".
- solso 6y ago
  Brave is based on Chrome, whereas Cliqz is based on Firefox (just to be precise). Note that ownership of code is not the same of ownership of a service... if Brave is depending on Google services, then you would be right (what happens with the [meta]searchers. But the code is open, and can be forked at will (there are some caveats to that claim, licences, internal APIs, etc.) You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy, it's how you do it that matters, becomes a design requirement. Collecting a url visited, can lead to build a user history (privacy hazard) or not. It's an design choice. The whole mantra that data!=privacy is doing a lot of damage (for anyone curios we did publish plenty of material on the topic, https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil.html https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil.htm...)
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    > Note that ownership of code is not the same of ownership of a service... if Brave is depending on Google services, then you would be right Unless Brave is prepared (i.e. has the necessary staff) to be able to independently develop their Chromium base without any help from Google whatsoever, then they are dependent upon at least one Google service - specifically, Google's development of Chromium. > The whole mantra that data!=privacy is doing a lot of damage No. The whole mantra that "privacy is possible when hoarding data" is what is doing damage. Every byte of data you collect is a liability - a privacy and security compromise waiting to happen. Even assuming your intentions were good and pure (which, as you might guess, I take with a hydrostatically-equilibrious and neighborhood-clearing grain of salt), even locally-stored analytics/performance data is a rich target for less-than-benign actors, and it's information that more often than not has no business being collected. That is: > You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy This is definitionally false. The very collection of data compromises one's privacy, by nature of it having been collected. Sometimes that compromise is necessary, but nothing Cliqz did seemed particularly necessary.

by solso 6y ago

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).

solso 6y ago
Yes, but once you have such a strong dependency it's difficult to remove it. Others have tried the approach and are still stuck with them. Sorry to hear that the quality was not good for you, it depends on country to country (depending on the users-base basically). For Germany, quality was good enough, QA analysis on stratified queries backed it up. That being said, perceived quality from a person is not properly reflected on NDCG-like metrics, you do not remember the 9 queries it did right, but the one that was totally off. In any case, DDG is good, and let me emphasize, they (and others) provide a lot of value to the users, privacy-concerned or otherwise. But the underlying problem is not getting fixed, unless, hopefully someday, they come up with an independent index (let's hope).

yellowapple 6y ago

> Brave is a great browser, respects to Brendan and team. We both "fight" against Google. Using Google's browser as the basis for one's own browser is certainly an interesting way to "fight" against Google. Much like how collecting ad performance / analytics data from users is an interesting way to achieve privacy as a "strict design requirement".

solso 6y ago
Brave is based on Chrome, whereas Cliqz is based on Firefox (just to be precise). Note that ownership of code is not the same of ownership of a service... if Brave is depending on Google services, then you would be right (what happens with the [meta]searchers. But the code is open, and can be forked at will (there are some caveats to that claim, licences, internal APIs, etc.) You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy, it's how you do it that matters, becomes a design requirement. Collecting a url visited, can lead to build a user history (privacy hazard) or not. It's an design choice. The whole mantra that data!=privacy is doing a lot of damage (for anyone curios we did publish plenty of material on the topic, https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil.html https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil.htm...)
- yellowapple 6y ago
  > Note that ownership of code is not the same of ownership of a service... if Brave is depending on Google services, then you would be right Unless Brave is prepared (i.e. has the necessary staff) to be able to independently develop their Chromium base without any help from Google whatsoever, then they are dependent upon at least one Google service - specifically, Google's development of Chromium. > The whole mantra that data!=privacy is doing a lot of damage No. The whole mantra that "privacy is possible when hoarding data" is what is doing damage. Every byte of data you collect is a liability - a privacy and security compromise waiting to happen. Even assuming your intentions were good and pure (which, as you might guess, I take with a hydrostatically-equilibrious and neighborhood-clearing grain of salt), even locally-stored analytics/performance data is a rich target for less-than-benign actors, and it's information that more often than not has no business being collected. That is: > You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy This is definitionally false. The very collection of data compromises one's privacy, by nature of it having been collected. Sometimes that compromise is necessary, but nothing Cliqz did seemed particularly necessary.