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I think it's tricky to a have credit card required for a private search engine unless there's a way to use it without the cc. Would love your thoughts on our a

I think it's tricky to a have credit card required for a private search engine unless there's a way to use it without the cc. Would love your thoughts on our approach: We (you.com founder here) think there should be two modes: 1. personalized mode where you have convenience, personalization (that clearly many people want from Google) and maybe even things like credit cards in the future, localization for directions/restaurants/weather and other useful "search apps". Even then, that mode is much better than Google in that we dont store IP addresses, don't track users across the internet, no targeted ads, etc. 2. hardcore private mode where you can be super private and nothing gets stored/logged/saved, no localization, everything proxied (slightly slower), no credit card needed, etc. We have those two modes. What I've seen sometimes is that new smaller private search engines like you.com that have much better privacy than Google get shot down because they still have some analytics etc. and aren't insanely private in all situations, eg. * we got criticized for having a mailinglist (easy to subscribe to or not) * doing in-house/on-prem analytics to know if you have bugs and issues in eg your ranker (how else will you ever be independent of Google/Bing and build an actually competitive search engine?) * trying to provide people with personalization (so they can downvote SEO/ads) - requires a login etc. The result is that most people (outside HN here) just stick with Google - where they get completely tracked everywhere and for everything. Sometimes it feels like perfection in privacy is the enemy of progress?

MattPalmer1086 4y ago
I like the idea of the two modes. From what I observe, most people don't really care about privacy, but the ones who do can be quite, errr, passionate about it, certainly sometimes to the point that nothing is good enough. So it's a difficult market. I worked at a privacy focused cryptographic startup a few years back. It didn't succeed... At the end of the day, I think you have to differentiate on the strength of the product itself, with privacy being a very nice thing on top of it to the best extent possible.
roughly 4y ago
VPN services have a similar dilemma - privacy service you pay for. Two solutions I can think of, broadly - first, a standard “we keep as little info as possible” type policy goes a long way. You’re competing with Google, who’s privacy policy is just the laughing emoji, so a real commitment and a policy to back it goes pretty far. Second, this is actually a good use case for crypto, so if you don’t already accept btc, it’s worth considering. You’re right, though - you’ll never please the hard core tinfoil crowd, but that’s not the whole privacy-interested crowd.

MattPalmer1086 4y ago

I like the idea of the two modes. From what I observe, most people don't really care about privacy, but the ones who do can be quite, errr, passionate about it, certainly sometimes to the point that nothing is good enough. So it's a difficult market. I worked at a privacy focused cryptographic startup a few years back. It didn't succeed... At the end of the day, I think you have to differentiate on the strength of the product itself, with privacy being a very nice thing on top of it to the best extent possible.

roughly 4y ago

VPN services have a similar dilemma - privacy service you pay for. Two solutions I can think of, broadly - first, a standard “we keep as little info as possible” type policy goes a long way. You’re competing with Google, who’s privacy policy is just the laughing emoji, so a real commitment and a policy to back it goes pretty far. Second, this is actually a good use case for crypto, so if you don’t already accept btc, it’s worth considering. You’re right, though - you’ll never please the hard core tinfoil crowd, but that’s not the whole privacy-interested crowd.