13 ms·

The Cliqz Story Is Over

111 points by marban 7y ago

js4ever 7y ago
Are you going to release some work done or is it going to disappear?
rakibtg 7y ago
Sorry to hear that, maybe make it open-source?
- chrmod 7y ago
  Hi. I'm one of the engineers that was working on Cliqz browsers. My focus was on the iOS one recently. All browser code was always open, you can find it on Github. iOS - https://github.com/cliqz/user-agent-ios https://github.com/cliqz/user-agent-ios Android - https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-android https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-android Android (NextGen, was planned for release next month) - https://github.com/cliqz/daisy https://github.com/cliqz/daisy Destkop - https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-f https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-f There is much more on our Github organizations: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/ https://github.com/cliqz-oss/ https://github.com/cliqz/ https://github.com/cliqz/ We loved OSS at Cliqz, it was a part of the company culture and ultimate proof how private our products were.
  - TedDoesntTalk 7y ago
    I can back this up. They were so concerned about anonymizing telemetry that they purchased reverse proxy servers from us, FoxyProxy, in order to anonymize the IP addresses and other info about the client sending the telemetry. There were at least 100 of them, maybe more, and they scrubbed headers and such IIRC.
eitland 7y ago
And today I learned Cliqz was a independent search engine, not an adtech company :-/
- Narretz 7y ago
  The name is imo impressively bad for a search engine, as the word "clicks" has become so strongly associated with clicking on an ad, or clicking in order to see an ad.
  - colmvp 7y ago
    I tend to agree. I hadn't heard of this company and my immediate thought was it was something related to marketing/advertising.
- solarkraft 7y ago
  Not only that, the first time I heard of them was through a Firefox data sharing outcry.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  Their attempt to pivot into the search engine space was admirable, and interesting on a technical level, but their initial business model killed a lot of goodwill for me and (it seems) a lot of other people. The search engine never had as good of results as DuckDuckGo, and DuckDuckGo didn't get its start by spying on German Firefox users, so the value proposition never made sense to me. The Cliqz browser was similarly problematic: basically just Firefox with some add-ons the functionality of which I could trivially pull from the Firefox Add-On Store, all under a brand name already tarnished. Might as well just use Firefox w/ DDG's "Privacy Essentials" (or Ghostery, once upon a time, before Cliqz bought it and ruined its brand trustworthiness, too) and uBlock Origin.
dzonga 7y ago
hope it's open sourced. and maybe the can open a non-profit to take care of the open source ip and the core dev's
andybak 7y ago
It's always strange when the first you hear of something is it's announcement of closure.
- chris_f 7y ago
  Maybe a good strategy could be to just announce your closure on the company's launch date to generate awareness. But joking aside, people's bandwidth for new websites is so limited, especially for something like Search, which the vast majority of the population considers to be a 'solved' problem. I found out about them when they flooded HN with blog posts a few months back, so they definitely made an effort. [0] What could they have done differently to reach you that they didn't do? [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1577829600&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1575237600&page=0&prefix=false&query=0x65.dev https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1577829600&dateRange=custom&...
__ka 7y ago
Here's a list of in-depth blog posts of the Cliqz journey and tech: https://www.0x65.dev/ https://www.0x65.dev/
igneo676 7y ago
Hrm, I guess I should've looked into them a bit more during the Firefox-Cliqz debacle. I still think it was the wrong move for Mozilla BUT it's also sad that we lost another player in search engine diversity. I also wonder what will happen to Ghostery, considering they were acquired by Cliqz :/
- andybak 7y ago
  > during the Firefox-Cliqz debacle I missed this so I looked it up. This seems like a good summary: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_mozilla_as_i_understand_it_and_metadrama/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_m...
- __ka 7y ago
  > I also wonder what will happen to Ghostery, considering they were acquired by Cliqz :/ Ghostery will continue to operate normally. > I guess I should've looked into them a bit more during the Firefox-Cliqz debacle. There's a lot of FUD regarding this. We outline what happened here: https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-11/the-pivot-that-excited-mozilla-and-google.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-11/the-pivot-that-excited-...
  - metajack 7y ago
    When someone points out that someone did something bad, clarifying they only did it to 1% of one country's users isn't a super strong defense. I don't think this was a good decision by Mozilla, especially as Germany is very privacy focused and its marketshare in Germany was quite good. The very next year I believe marketshare dropped in Germany substantially. This was another Mozilla self-own, and it was painful to watch from inside while I worked there.
    - __ka 7y ago
      > When someone points out that someone did something bad, clarifying they only did it to 1% of one country's users isn't a super strong defense. I don't see where I made this "clarification". Let's be clear. Firefox was trying to test switching from Google to Cliqz (where it had a stake). Mozilla had a difficult time trying to break the golden cage they find themselves in. To their credit, they did try. Ultimately the Cliqz-Firefox integration was, unilaterally, cancelled. If your main source of revenue comes from your “competitor” you are slowly pushing yourself to irrelevance. And also, the privacy issue again: I addressed a similar question in another comment in this thread [0]. If you want to spread FUD, please make a proper case. [0] Another comment on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23045099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23045099
stereolambda 7y ago
This is sad. I used them for some time on one of my computers. Their own index results were quite impressive, for an independent index -- sufficient in maybe 30%-50% cases (my guess and not an actual statistic). But this highlighted how hard it is to build an index that is useful. My take is if there is to be a political will to break mono- and oligopolies by building alternatives, the EU (or whoever) should do it top-down, at least the indexing infrastructure. It will bureaucratic, likely not financially efficient, but probably some things need to be built this way. I would prefer aggressive market fragmentation, but this is not very politically likely, given how European states like to operate. From the maker's perspective, I don't see building things with mainly political appeal as a desirable path. (And I'm using the term politics broadly, and not pejoratively -- this includes far more important stuff than tech gadgets, like you know, liberty.) Political decisions of states and individuals are too finicky for business. I think aspiring people should do something fundamentally different than incumbents in terms of functionality. Probably things that don't scale or appeal to megacorps. Anyway, congrats on what you've done. Without Covid you would surely have a better shot.
- wpietri 7y ago
  I would love to see more investment in that sort of infrastructure commons. Especially if it were not directly under the control of a single government, but spun off into a relatively independent entity, akin to the Red Cross, the USPS, or the FNMA.
- hinkley 7y ago
  One of the problems I have to deal with is bot traffic, and more search engines is going to mean more bot traffic. Probably every SaaS company is thinking about that on some level. Maybe if we want to break the oligopoly we need an alternative to polling and scanning to report changes to our websites. I knew a company that was thinking along those lines but they flamed out even before Google became dominant, and I don't know if anyone has asked that question since.
  - darkwater 7y ago
    "Oh, no, I didn't think about sending my updates to Cliqz because Google is the dominant player anyway"
state_throw_2 7y ago
>It became clear to us in the last weeks, that all political initiatives to create an independent European digital infrastructure have been stalled or postponed for years. This is pretty bad, if people who were allegedly concerned about tying themselves to a foreign mast suddenly throw up their hands and say "Google/Apple/Facebook it is!" at the first sign of trouble. It's even a little surprising, given the borders being slammed shut to both people and goods around the world. I guess Europe will just be a "scramble for Africa" style battleground between being an American digital colony and a Chinese digital colony. I hope they open source all the software they can as well as their index. This whole thing really is pretty sad. It is also sad they couldn't come up with a way to scrape by besides government backing. It is true "the world needs a private search engine that is not just using Bing or Google in the backend." At least there are private.sh, Mojeek, Yippy, and Yandex around for now.
akersten 7y ago
In my opinion, the success of a search engine depends entirely on its name. Look at the search engines that have failed: AltaVista, Cliqz, Cuil, Dogpile, (dozens more). They all have awful names that don't convey the idea of search. Compare it to a name like Google: it rolls of the tongue, is easy to verb-ify ("google it" -- no one would ever say "cliqz it"), and the actual letterforms are pleasing to the eye. Bing is a pretty good name too - even shorter at one syllable, and a pretty alright verb. It follows that Bing is still around and arguably the #2 product in the space. "Why don't you Yahoo it?" - another awkward sentence, another search engine that failed. Even DDG has taken steps to shorten their brand to "duck" (duck.com), and there's something pleasing about saying "duck it" :)
- eterm 7y ago
  That's just bias because you've had 20 years of "google" embedded in your brain. When launching google sounded more awkward than Yahoo did at the time.
  - akersten 7y ago
    The word didn't become any easier or harder to say from the moment it was launched. It was clear how to pronounce it. How do you pronounce Cuil?
  - furyofantares 7y ago
    On the other hand if google had stuck with their first name -- BackRub -- I do wonder if they'd have had quite so much success. And I find it amazing that I wonder this given the experience of using google initially was like you had grown a super power over night. But maybe usage would have spread slower and given competitors more time to catch up.
    - mthoms 7y ago
      The BackRub name offered some.. er.. "unique" marketing copy opportunities ;-) For a "happy ending" to your search, try "I'm feeling lucky" on BackRub.com today!
mahoho 7y ago
I mean, maybe it's because you named your search engine "Cliqz"
- wpietri 7y ago
  I can only think that name sounded much better to German ears, as that's where it started? Yes, to me it's reminiscent of clique, which is not a word I like, but with a mutation that makes it seem dubious and low-rent.
  - Tomte 7y ago
    As a German, to me the name always sounded scammy.
    - wpietri 7y ago
      Hah! So much for my attempt to be generous.
    - dessant 7y ago
      You might also have gotten that impression when it auto-installed through unrelated chip.de downloads [1], without a way to opt out. This [2] post also documents Cliqz being covertly auto-installed with .NET Framework. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74vt08/psa_huber_burda_media_the_majority_owner_of_cliqz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74vt08/psa_huber_b... [2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_m&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://web.archive.org/web/20180625115547/http://www.compboard.de/blog/cliqz-deinstallieren/ https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_m...
      - nullymcnull 7y ago
        > This [2] post also documents Cliqz being covertly auto-installed with .NET Framework. No, it documents the same thing as the other link - that unrelated chip.de downloads (including .NET Framework, though I have no idea why anyone in their right mind would source that from chip.de) are by default wrapping any downloads in a "secure CHIP installer" which is chock full of dodgy adware installations, apparently including Cliqz without any mention or option to remove.
rakoo 7y ago
I'm very sorry to hear that, and as a fellow European I am both proud to see such an amazing effort at competing in one of the most difficult spaces, and sad to see so little support from the continent after all those calls about sovereignty and escaping the claws of FANGs. If anything this failure isn't just in the company but also in the hostile environment. I hope this doesn't detract potential interested parties from trying the adventure again, because we desperately need an alternative to Google Search
daxterspeed 7y ago
I'm really hoping another company is able to pick up the Cliqz search index. Having an option to Google and Bing is important.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  DDG is going, "Am I a joke to you?"
  - infinityplus1 7y ago
    DDG also depends on Bing somewhat.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
      Having access to Cliqz' crawler would help reduce that dependence. To be clear, though, DDG does have a crawler of its own, and has historically used Yandex data as well (though I don't know if they still do). IIRC they also used Yahoo, but now that's basically indistinguishable from Bing.
  - luhn 7y ago
    DDG doesn't operate their own index, they use Bing.
    - GordonS 7y ago
      IIRC, they do actually have their own index too.
      - TedDoesntTalk 7y ago
        Source for their own index?
        GordonS 7y ago
        I was just remembering from another HN comment a while back, but there is this: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-source-of-DuckDuckGo-search-results https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-source-of-DuckDuckGo-search-... Looks to be answered by someone at DDG confirming it.
Aeolun 7y ago
Does anyone else feel like this post tries too hard to be cheerful?
tannhaeuser 7y ago
Is there no way to keep it going, if only to finance hosting or keep know-how? I don't need to tell the people at cliqz.com, but the last couple weeks have demonstrated clearly that we could also be looking into a grim future of oligopolistic dominance in digital media, ecommerce, advertising, e-learning, and chat/workflow. I guess it's not the right time to ask for donations/crowdfunding, but maybe you could approach a second-tier cloud hoster having an axe to grind with G, or even AWS for sponsorship.
- xwdv 7y ago
  We’re not looking at it, we’re in it. Now we can only look out toward a future where we are free of those things.
- x32n23nr 7y ago
  If there are any investors reading this - maybe it's a good time to reach out?
_236436532 7y ago
Can you say anything about the reasons? I read that Cliqz only had a few 100.000 daily active users, which indeed seems low for a product with so much venture backing. I still don't see why the investors would pull the plug right now, as clearly they should understand that it takes time to build a Google competitor. Then again, Cliqz has been at this since more than 10 years (7 years under Burda) with seemingly little traction, so maybe their patience just ran out. That the publishing industry apparently lost a large share of its ad revenue in the last months might have been a deciding factor as well.
- kgraves 7y ago
  they don't care they want money now.
gfodor 7y ago
I have no direct experience, but it seems to me that starting to look to the government for funding of your startup may be akin to the phase transition a startup goes through when they have a potential acquirer. A door you don't want to walk through, most of the time, due to the distraction it will create, and potentially seal your fate. http://www.paulgraham.com/corpdev.html http://www.paulgraham.com/corpdev.html
bzb3 7y 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...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- cerberusss 7y ago
  I do remember but I'd like to add that "some" means "less than one percent of German people who download Firefox from the main page".
- __ka 7y ago
  This statement is misleading. Firstly, for context here's the paragraph you ought to be referring to: > This experiment also includes the data collection tool Cliqz uses to build its recommendation engine. Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit. Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox. Cliqz does not build browsing profiles for individual users and discards the user's IP address once the data is collected. Cliqz's code is available for public review and a description of these techniques can be found here. This section is a horrible write up of what happened. Over the years, among a lot of other privacy tech (e.g. [0][1][2]), we developed a privacy-preserving data collection framework we call Human Web [3]. The gist of it is simple: Users contribute data. There's no way to link any two messages with one another making it impossible to build profiles out of the data. In fact, most of the URLs are dropped thanks to these strict checks. Mozilla, Princeton University and Red Pen Team have audited the approach. The code is open-sourced [4]. Feel free to audit it, and also please feel free to use it in your projects. If you are genuinely interested in the approach, please read [3] and let's discuss details. Here's the bigger issue. We have created an unhealthy, and wrong narrative around privacy vs data collection. It's a false dichotomy. We also wrote at length about this here [5]. Data from people, is not the same as personal data. Record linkage here is key, and we prevent it - even at a network level [6]. If you are interested to read more about the Firefox Integration (and the context in which it happened), read this: https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-11/the-pivot-that-excited-mozilla-and-google.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-11/the-pivot-that-excited-... --- [0] Adblocker (fastest there is): https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-20/not-all-adblockers-are-born-equal.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-20/not-all-adblockers-are-... [1] Algorithmic anti-tracking (first and only): https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-19/blocking-tracking-without-blocking-trackers.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-19/blocking-tracking-witho... [2] Anti-Phishing: https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-21/anti-phishing-with-privacy-in-mind.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-21/anti-phishing-with-priv... [3] Human Web: https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting-data-in-a-socially-responsible-manner.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting-da... [4]: Human Web Code: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-core/tree/master/modules/human-web https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-core/tree/master/module... [5]: Is Data Collection Evil: https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil... [6]: HPN: https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-04/human-web-proxy-network-hpn.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-04/human-web-proxy-network...
artsyca 7y ago
Did they have a casual company culture?
- TedDoesntTalk 7y ago
  Why is that relevant?
  - artsyca 7y ago
    He talks! Isn't that the whole point of casual culture? When you come up short you can protect your self by saying oh well at least we didn't try our best
lykahb 7y ago
Promoting an independent browser today is hard. They may've fared better with a more modest offering of an extension. I hope that Ghostery, acquired, survives.
flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago
As sad as this is, if after a few years of trying their best they [0] weren't more compelling than a website that removes image backgrounds [1] (just a random popular website I stumbled across the other day) then I hate to say it but they never had a chance to begin with. I've seen obscure personal blogs with more traffic than they garnered. I know they built a privacy first browser as well that probably had no affiliation whatsoever with alexa's data collection department, but if they were of any use at all they surely would have spilled over into non-privacy centric browsers. Just look at duckduckgo [2] tl;dr it wasn't covid that killed them off. [0] https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cliqz.com https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cliqz.com [1] https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/remove.bg https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/remove.bg [2] https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/duckduckgo.com https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/duckduckgo.com
- atombender 7y ago
  To be fair, they only launched their Internet search engine a few months ago, and it's not out of beta. It appears that this was a pivot after trying many other things, including creating a new browser. They started out their search stuff with a browser extension. It's not a new company; they've been around since 2008.
TedDoesntTalk 7y ago
The company I work for (FoxyProxy) provides them with many servers — for their web crawlers (“the human web”) for their vpn app (called Lumen), and other projects. We would be happy to provide them free of charge for several months, if that would help.
- philippclassen 7y ago
  That is nice to hear. When we had issues with the Human Web Proxies - and that did not happen often - you were always quick in helping out. Thanks for the great support through the years!
- dewey 7y ago
  There's probably a better place for this proposal than a HN comment?
  - hardwaresofton 7y ago
    So you're definitely right, but one of the reasons I view HN as one of the most valuable places on the internet I frequent is that it's very likely that someone from Clickz will see the comment, and I've done my part to upvote it to the top. I also think it's safe to assume that this is not the only place they'll reach out. Maybe it's a bit of self-promotion for the hosting company but I sure don't mind if they're willing to support the Cliqz effort.
  - TedDoesntTalk 7y ago
    Thank you. The offer was sent simultaneously through other channels.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    shrug this is the best channel into many companies who don't post good contact details. It's the best channel for Google or Apple appeals, for example.
kirse 7y ago
Good to hear. Cliqz was always demonstrably anti-US as their core motive [1], I never understood why HN even allowed their domain to post on here. Glad we won't have to keep sending them free traffic and enabling them to spread their influence using the clout of our terrible "market sealing, monopolistic, rule-discarding" country and its products. I've got nothing against the EU, but I'm happy to hear this one failed because having a core company culture that is principled by frustration / anger over the US (while ignoring its overwhelmingly positive contributions to tech) was bound to foment a globally negative perception on US tech as Cliqz influence grew. [1] We Europeans have watched for too long how US companies are capturing more and more key technologies and users. How they are forming monopolies. How they are already sealing off the markets of the future today. How they disregard our rules and values and impose theirs on us. How they make vast profits from the exploitation of our data and thus fill their war chest for further campaigns of conquest. [1] https://cliqz.com/en/about https://cliqz.com/en/about
floatingatoll 7y ago
Yesterday's discussion about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031520
gentleman11 7y ago
Cliqz got a lot of bad press but when I looked at their papers in depth, they seemed authenticity interested in doing things right. I doubt many people read those papers though

111 points by marban 7y ago

js4ever 7y ago

Are you going to release some work done or is it going to disappear?

rakibtg 7y ago

Sorry to hear that, maybe make it open-source?

chrmod 7y ago
Hi. I'm one of the engineers that was working on Cliqz browsers. My focus was on the iOS one recently. All browser code was always open, you can find it on Github. iOS - https://github.com/cliqz/user-agent-ios https://github.com/cliqz/user-agent-ios Android - https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-android https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-android Android (NextGen, was planned for release next month) - https://github.com/cliqz/daisy https://github.com/cliqz/daisy Destkop - https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-f https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-f There is much more on our Github organizations: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/ https://github.com/cliqz-oss/ https://github.com/cliqz/ https://github.com/cliqz/ We loved OSS at Cliqz, it was a part of the company culture and ultimate proof how private our products were.
- TedDoesntTalk 7y ago
  I can back this up. They were so concerned about anonymizing telemetry that they purchased reverse proxy servers from us, FoxyProxy, in order to anonymize the IP addresses and other info about the client sending the telemetry. There were at least 100 of them, maybe more, and they scrubbed headers and such IIRC.

eitland 7y ago

And today I learned Cliqz was a independent search engine, not an adtech company :-/

Narretz 7y ago
The name is imo impressively bad for a search engine, as the word "clicks" has become so strongly associated with clicking on an ad, or clicking in order to see an ad.
- colmvp 7y ago
  I tend to agree. I hadn't heard of this company and my immediate thought was it was something related to marketing/advertising.
solarkraft 7y ago
Not only that, the first time I heard of them was through a Firefox data sharing outcry.
yellowapple 7y ago
Their attempt to pivot into the search engine space was admirable, and interesting on a technical level, but their initial business model killed a lot of goodwill for me and (it seems) a lot of other people. The search engine never had as good of results as DuckDuckGo, and DuckDuckGo didn't get its start by spying on German Firefox users, so the value proposition never made sense to me. The Cliqz browser was similarly problematic: basically just Firefox with some add-ons the functionality of which I could trivially pull from the Firefox Add-On Store, all under a brand name already tarnished. Might as well just use Firefox w/ DDG's "Privacy Essentials" (or Ghostery, once upon a time, before Cliqz bought it and ruined its brand trustworthiness, too) and uBlock Origin.

dzonga 7y ago

hope it's open sourced. and maybe the can open a non-profit to take care of the open source ip and the core dev's

andybak 7y ago

It's always strange when the first you hear of something is it's announcement of closure.

chris_f 7y ago
Maybe a good strategy could be to just announce your closure on the company's launch date to generate awareness. But joking aside, people's bandwidth for new websites is so limited, especially for something like Search, which the vast majority of the population considers to be a 'solved' problem. I found out about them when they flooded HN with blog posts a few months back, so they definitely made an effort. [0] What could they have done differently to reach you that they didn't do? [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1577829600&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1575237600&page=0&prefix=false&query=0x65.dev https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1577829600&dateRange=custom&...

__ka 7y ago

Here's a list of in-depth blog posts of the Cliqz journey and tech: https://www.0x65.dev/ https://www.0x65.dev/

igneo676 7y ago

Hrm, I guess I should've looked into them a bit more during the Firefox-Cliqz debacle. I still think it was the wrong move for Mozilla BUT it's also sad that we lost another player in search engine diversity. I also wonder what will happen to Ghostery, considering they were acquired by Cliqz :/

andybak 7y ago
> during the Firefox-Cliqz debacle I missed this so I looked it up. This seems like a good summary: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_mozilla_as_i_understand_it_and_metadrama/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_m...
__ka 7y ago
> I also wonder what will happen to Ghostery, considering they were acquired by Cliqz :/ Ghostery will continue to operate normally. > I guess I should've looked into them a bit more during the Firefox-Cliqz debacle. There's a lot of FUD regarding this. We outline what happened here: https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-11/the-pivot-that-excited-mozilla-and-google.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-11/the-pivot-that-excited-...
- metajack 7y ago
  When someone points out that someone did something bad, clarifying they only did it to 1% of one country's users isn't a super strong defense. I don't think this was a good decision by Mozilla, especially as Germany is very privacy focused and its marketshare in Germany was quite good. The very next year I believe marketshare dropped in Germany substantially. This was another Mozilla self-own, and it was painful to watch from inside while I worked there.
  - __ka 7y ago
    > When someone points out that someone did something bad, clarifying they only did it to 1% of one country's users isn't a super strong defense. I don't see where I made this "clarification". Let's be clear. Firefox was trying to test switching from Google to Cliqz (where it had a stake). Mozilla had a difficult time trying to break the golden cage they find themselves in. To their credit, they did try. Ultimately the Cliqz-Firefox integration was, unilaterally, cancelled. If your main source of revenue comes from your “competitor” you are slowly pushing yourself to irrelevance. And also, the privacy issue again: I addressed a similar question in another comment in this thread [0]. If you want to spread FUD, please make a proper case. [0] Another comment on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23045099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23045099

stereolambda 7y ago

This is sad. I used them for some time on one of my computers. Their own index results were quite impressive, for an independent index -- sufficient in maybe 30%-50% cases (my guess and not an actual statistic). But this highlighted how hard it is to build an index that is useful. My take is if there is to be a political will to break mono- and oligopolies by building alternatives, the EU (or whoever) should do it top-down, at least the indexing infrastructure. It will bureaucratic, likely not financially efficient, but probably some things need to be built this way. I would prefer aggressive market fragmentation, but this is not very politically likely, given how European states like to operate. From the maker's perspective, I don't see building things with mainly political appeal as a desirable path. (And I'm using the term politics broadly, and not pejoratively -- this includes far more important stuff than tech gadgets, like you know, liberty.) Political decisions of states and individuals are too finicky for business. I think aspiring people should do something fundamentally different than incumbents in terms of functionality. Probably things that don't scale or appeal to megacorps. Anyway, congrats on what you've done. Without Covid you would surely have a better shot.

wpietri 7y ago
I would love to see more investment in that sort of infrastructure commons. Especially if it were not directly under the control of a single government, but spun off into a relatively independent entity, akin to the Red Cross, the USPS, or the FNMA.
hinkley 7y ago
One of the problems I have to deal with is bot traffic, and more search engines is going to mean more bot traffic. Probably every SaaS company is thinking about that on some level. Maybe if we want to break the oligopoly we need an alternative to polling and scanning to report changes to our websites. I knew a company that was thinking along those lines but they flamed out even before Google became dominant, and I don't know if anyone has asked that question since.
- darkwater 7y ago
  "Oh, no, I didn't think about sending my updates to Cliqz because Google is the dominant player anyway"

state_throw_2 7y ago

>It became clear to us in the last weeks, that all political initiatives to create an independent European digital infrastructure have been stalled or postponed for years. This is pretty bad, if people who were allegedly concerned about tying themselves to a foreign mast suddenly throw up their hands and say "Google/Apple/Facebook it is!" at the first sign of trouble. It's even a little surprising, given the borders being slammed shut to both people and goods around the world. I guess Europe will just be a "scramble for Africa" style battleground between being an American digital colony and a Chinese digital colony. I hope they open source all the software they can as well as their index. This whole thing really is pretty sad. It is also sad they couldn't come up with a way to scrape by besides government backing. It is true "the world needs a private search engine that is not just using Bing or Google in the backend." At least there are private.sh, Mojeek, Yippy, and Yandex around for now.

akersten 7y ago

In my opinion, the success of a search engine depends entirely on its name. Look at the search engines that have failed: AltaVista, Cliqz, Cuil, Dogpile, (dozens more). They all have awful names that don't convey the idea of search. Compare it to a name like Google: it rolls of the tongue, is easy to verb-ify ("google it" -- no one would ever say "cliqz it"), and the actual letterforms are pleasing to the eye. Bing is a pretty good name too - even shorter at one syllable, and a pretty alright verb. It follows that Bing is still around and arguably the #2 product in the space. "Why don't you Yahoo it?" - another awkward sentence, another search engine that failed. Even DDG has taken steps to shorten their brand to "duck" (duck.com), and there's something pleasing about saying "duck it" :)

eterm 7y ago
That's just bias because you've had 20 years of "google" embedded in your brain. When launching google sounded more awkward than Yahoo did at the time.
- akersten 7y ago
  The word didn't become any easier or harder to say from the moment it was launched. It was clear how to pronounce it. How do you pronounce Cuil?
- furyofantares 7y ago
  On the other hand if google had stuck with their first name -- BackRub -- I do wonder if they'd have had quite so much success. And I find it amazing that I wonder this given the experience of using google initially was like you had grown a super power over night. But maybe usage would have spread slower and given competitors more time to catch up.
  - mthoms 7y ago
    The BackRub name offered some.. er.. "unique" marketing copy opportunities ;-) For a "happy ending" to your search, try "I'm feeling lucky" on BackRub.com today!

mahoho 7y ago

I mean, maybe it's because you named your search engine "Cliqz"

wpietri 7y ago
I can only think that name sounded much better to German ears, as that's where it started? Yes, to me it's reminiscent of clique, which is not a word I like, but with a mutation that makes it seem dubious and low-rent.
- Tomte 7y ago
  As a German, to me the name always sounded scammy.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    Hah! So much for my attempt to be generous.
  - dessant 7y ago
    You might also have gotten that impression when it auto-installed through unrelated chip.de downloads [1], without a way to opt out. This [2] post also documents Cliqz being covertly auto-installed with .NET Framework. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74vt08/psa_huber_burda_media_the_majority_owner_of_cliqz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74vt08/psa_huber_b... [2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_m&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://web.archive.org/web/20180625115547/http://www.compboard.de/blog/cliqz-deinstallieren/ https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_m...
    - nullymcnull 7y ago
      > This [2] post also documents Cliqz being covertly auto-installed with .NET Framework. No, it documents the same thing as the other link - that unrelated chip.de downloads (including .NET Framework, though I have no idea why anyone in their right mind would source that from chip.de) are by default wrapping any downloads in a "secure CHIP installer" which is chock full of dodgy adware installations, apparently including Cliqz without any mention or option to remove.

rakoo 7y ago

I'm very sorry to hear that, and as a fellow European I am both proud to see such an amazing effort at competing in one of the most difficult spaces, and sad to see so little support from the continent after all those calls about sovereignty and escaping the claws of FANGs. If anything this failure isn't just in the company but also in the hostile environment. I hope this doesn't detract potential interested parties from trying the adventure again, because we desperately need an alternative to Google Search

daxterspeed 7y ago

I'm really hoping another company is able to pick up the Cliqz search index. Having an option to Google and Bing is important.

bdcravens 7y ago
DDG is going, "Am I a joke to you?"
- infinityplus1 7y ago
  DDG also depends on Bing somewhat.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    Having access to Cliqz' crawler would help reduce that dependence. To be clear, though, DDG does have a crawler of its own, and has historically used Yandex data as well (though I don't know if they still do). IIRC they also used Yahoo, but now that's basically indistinguishable from Bing.
- luhn 7y ago
  DDG doesn't operate their own index, they use Bing.
  - GordonS 7y ago
    IIRC, they do actually have their own index too.
    - TedDoesntTalk 7y ago
      Source for their own index?
      - GordonS 7y ago
        I was just remembering from another HN comment a while back, but there is this: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-source-of-DuckDuckGo-search-results https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-source-of-DuckDuckGo-search-... Looks to be answered by someone at DDG confirming it.

Aeolun 7y ago

Does anyone else feel like this post tries too hard to be cheerful?

tannhaeuser 7y ago

Is there no way to keep it going, if only to finance hosting or keep know-how? I don't need to tell the people at cliqz.com, but the last couple weeks have demonstrated clearly that we could also be looking into a grim future of oligopolistic dominance in digital media, ecommerce, advertising, e-learning, and chat/workflow. I guess it's not the right time to ask for donations/crowdfunding, but maybe you could approach a second-tier cloud hoster having an axe to grind with G, or even AWS for sponsorship.

xwdv 7y ago
We’re not looking at it, we’re in it. Now we can only look out toward a future where we are free of those things.
x32n23nr 7y ago
If there are any investors reading this - maybe it's a good time to reach out?

_236436532 7y ago

Can you say anything about the reasons? I read that Cliqz only had a few 100.000 daily active users, which indeed seems low for a product with so much venture backing. I still don't see why the investors would pull the plug right now, as clearly they should understand that it takes time to build a Google competitor. Then again, Cliqz has been at this since more than 10 years (7 years under Burda) with seemingly little traction, so maybe their patience just ran out. That the publishing industry apparently lost a large share of its ad revenue in the last months might have been a deciding factor as well.

kgraves 7y ago
they don't care they want money now.

gfodor 7y ago

I have no direct experience, but it seems to me that starting to look to the government for funding of your startup may be akin to the phase transition a startup goes through when they have a potential acquirer. A door you don't want to walk through, most of the time, due to the distraction it will create, and potentially seal your fate. http://www.paulgraham.com/corpdev.html http://www.paulgraham.com/corpdev.html

bzb3 7y 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...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cerberusss 7y ago
I do remember but I'd like to add that "some" means "less than one percent of German people who download Firefox from the main page".
__ka 7y ago
This statement is misleading. Firstly, for context here's the paragraph you ought to be referring to: > This experiment also includes the data collection tool Cliqz uses to build its recommendation engine. Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit. Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox. Cliqz does not build browsing profiles for individual users and discards the user's IP address once the data is collected. Cliqz's code is available for public review and a description of these techniques can be found here. This section is a horrible write up of what happened. Over the years, among a lot of other privacy tech (e.g. [0][1][2]), we developed a privacy-preserving data collection framework we call Human Web [3]. The gist of it is simple: Users contribute data. There's no way to link any two messages with one another making it impossible to build profiles out of the data. In fact, most of the URLs are dropped thanks to these strict checks. Mozilla, Princeton University and Red Pen Team have audited the approach. The code is open-sourced [4]. Feel free to audit it, and also please feel free to use it in your projects. If you are genuinely interested in the approach, please read [3] and let's discuss details. Here's the bigger issue. We have created an unhealthy, and wrong narrative around privacy vs data collection. It's a false dichotomy. We also wrote at length about this here [5]. Data from people, is not the same as personal data. Record linkage here is key, and we prevent it - even at a network level [6]. If you are interested to read more about the Firefox Integration (and the context in which it happened), read this: https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-11/the-pivot-that-excited-mozilla-and-google.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-11/the-pivot-that-excited-... --- [0] Adblocker (fastest there is): https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-20/not-all-adblockers-are-born-equal.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-20/not-all-adblockers-are-... [1] Algorithmic anti-tracking (first and only): https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-19/blocking-tracking-without-blocking-trackers.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-19/blocking-tracking-witho... [2] Anti-Phishing: https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-21/anti-phishing-with-privacy-in-mind.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-21/anti-phishing-with-priv... [3] Human Web: https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting-data-in-a-socially-responsible-manner.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting-da... [4]: Human Web Code: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-core/tree/master/modules/human-web https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-core/tree/master/module... [5]: Is Data Collection Evil: https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil... [6]: HPN: https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-04/human-web-proxy-network-hpn.html https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-04/human-web-proxy-network...

artsyca 7y ago

Did they have a casual company culture?

TedDoesntTalk 7y ago
Why is that relevant?
- artsyca 7y ago
  He talks! Isn't that the whole point of casual culture? When you come up short you can protect your self by saying oh well at least we didn't try our best

lykahb 7y ago

Promoting an independent browser today is hard. They may've fared better with a more modest offering of an extension. I hope that Ghostery, acquired, survives.

flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago

As sad as this is, if after a few years of trying their best they [0] weren't more compelling than a website that removes image backgrounds [1] (just a random popular website I stumbled across the other day) then I hate to say it but they never had a chance to begin with. I've seen obscure personal blogs with more traffic than they garnered. I know they built a privacy first browser as well that probably had no affiliation whatsoever with alexa's data collection department, but if they were of any use at all they surely would have spilled over into non-privacy centric browsers. Just look at duckduckgo [2] tl;dr it wasn't covid that killed them off. [0] https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cliqz.com https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cliqz.com [1] https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/remove.bg https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/remove.bg [2] https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/duckduckgo.com https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/duckduckgo.com

atombender 7y ago
To be fair, they only launched their Internet search engine a few months ago, and it's not out of beta. It appears that this was a pivot after trying many other things, including creating a new browser. They started out their search stuff with a browser extension. It's not a new company; they've been around since 2008.

TedDoesntTalk 7y ago

The company I work for (FoxyProxy) provides them with many servers — for their web crawlers (“the human web”) for their vpn app (called Lumen), and other projects. We would be happy to provide them free of charge for several months, if that would help.

philippclassen 7y ago
That is nice to hear. When we had issues with the Human Web Proxies - and that did not happen often - you were always quick in helping out. Thanks for the great support through the years!
dewey 7y ago
There's probably a better place for this proposal than a HN comment?
- hardwaresofton 7y ago
  So you're definitely right, but one of the reasons I view HN as one of the most valuable places on the internet I frequent is that it's very likely that someone from Clickz will see the comment, and I've done my part to upvote it to the top. I also think it's safe to assume that this is not the only place they'll reach out. Maybe it's a bit of self-promotion for the hosting company but I sure don't mind if they're willing to support the Cliqz effort.
- TedDoesntTalk 7y ago
  Thank you. The offer was sent simultaneously through other channels.
- pjc50 7y ago
  shrug this is the best channel into many companies who don't post good contact details. It's the best channel for Google or Apple appeals, for example.

kirse 7y ago

Good to hear. Cliqz was always demonstrably anti-US as their core motive [1], I never understood why HN even allowed their domain to post on here. Glad we won't have to keep sending them free traffic and enabling them to spread their influence using the clout of our terrible "market sealing, monopolistic, rule-discarding" country and its products. I've got nothing against the EU, but I'm happy to hear this one failed because having a core company culture that is principled by frustration / anger over the US (while ignoring its overwhelmingly positive contributions to tech) was bound to foment a globally negative perception on US tech as Cliqz influence grew. [1] We Europeans have watched for too long how US companies are capturing more and more key technologies and users. How they are forming monopolies. How they are already sealing off the markets of the future today. How they disregard our rules and values and impose theirs on us. How they make vast profits from the exploitation of our data and thus fill their war chest for further campaigns of conquest. [1] https://cliqz.com/en/about https://cliqz.com/en/about

floatingatoll 7y ago

Yesterday's discussion about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031520

gentleman11 7y ago

Cliqz got a lot of bad press but when I looked at their papers in depth, they seemed authenticity interested in doing things right. I doubt many people read those papers though