> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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).
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".
The search engine kind of works, but years behind Google. The most annoying missing feature is no "exact terms" search, which is a problem when googling error messages.
All considered I pressed the Google button at the bottom maybe half of the times, and I bet very few people would stick to such a search engine.
> Cliqz failed because of our strong passion for technology and a missing drive from business development
I don't know about Cliqz but this is generally true. We developers do a great job building (oh well) but if somebody doesn't do an even greater job at selling the outcome won't be good. The importance of selling vs building is 80-20 IMHO.
https://www.runnaroo.com/blog/the-search-engine-hacker-news-...
A common argument I've seen used to defend bad names is "Google and Twitter have silly names, and they succeeded!" Well, I was there when those companies first came on the scene, and I didn't find their names embarrassing, so there's a difference between silly and embarrassing, I believe.
I do remember "iPad" sounding just bizarre. Now it's household.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox
It amazes me so many companies (not just privacy oriented) don't think the ground truth of having a useful product which treats users with respect is necessary in order to be successful.
The browser and search engine were a front for the "offers", plain and simple. The whole premise was Orwellian to its core; war was peace, freedom was slavery, ignorance was strength, and tracking was privacy.
I sympathize with the newly-displaced employees facing the grim prospects of finding work in a fractured labor market. Hopefully they'll all have a chance to put their skills toward more honest ventures.
Any known efforts in this direction?
I wrote a blog post comparing search results quality earlier this year. YaCy came in last, even behind Cliqz.
https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has...
I mean, obviously, there is more to building a "search engine" than just a big fat searchable index. I think where Google shines is to understand what you mean, not what you wrote. This is a pretty complex task, I guess.
I've never even heard of this company, and I'm still sorta tuned into the browser business, and based in Europe.
Where did they get the money to hire ~100 people?
Edit: Ah. They got their money from a german media group struggling to stay relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Burda_Media
- https://github.com/cliqz/cliqz-concept-browser
- https://github.com/cliqz/daisy
I love Beaker Browser and its vision for a P2P web, but it hasn't had a major release in a while (despite seemingly having active development) and it appears it will be desktop-only for the foreseeable future. I don't think Dat will have much uptake until there is a solid browser on both desktop and mobile.
(There was also the Bunsen browser trying to support Dat on Android, but it seems to be abandonware and I was never able to get it working anyway: https://github.com/bunsenbrowser/bunsen/ )
The company name never bothered me, but from the comments it looks like I'm in the minority there. Is it any worse than DuckDuckGo?
If you are looking for another search engine with their own search index, also check out Mojeek. https://www.mojeek.com/
And while I don't like some political positions of the backing publisher they had: It is true that Europe and Germany needs enterprises like that, companies that can be alternatives to the US tech giants. Not sure they should be publicly funded, but should they get support? Of course.
Thanks for the link to Mojeek, seems worth a look.
Btw, https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/farewell-from-cliqz is maybe a more fitting link target for the submission with the current title (dang?).
This must be a joke, right? Who the heck installs a browser (extension) that advertises on a porn website? Changing the Cliqz name would have been WAY better. Cliqz sounds super shady and I would never have guessed it was a search engine.
To me this product sounds like one of those toolbars in web browsers years ago.
Farewell, au revoir.
Presumably the problem is monetizing it. I don't have good answers for that.
Ads are obvious. However, that introduces the perverse incentives that everybody complains about.
