The Cliqz Story Is Over | Hacker News Reader

The Cliqz Story Is Over

cliqz.com

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

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

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&...

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.

There's probably a better place for this proposal than a HN comment?

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.

Thank you. The offer was sent simultaneously through other channels.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

"Oh, no, I didn't think about sending my updates to Cliqz because Google is the dominant player anyway"

Yeah I don't think a straight hub and spoke structured pub-sub approach is the right answer, either.

The thing is, though, if you don't send the data out, you're going to get crawled. So sending identical data to 5 crawlers instead of 3 is probably still cheaper. Only of course the incumbents will add extra features on that don't work for everyone else...

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

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.

I tend to agree. I hadn't heard of this company and my immediate thought was it was something related to marketing/advertising.

Not only that, the first time I heard of them was through a Firefox data sharing outcry.

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.

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

[1] https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/remove.bg

[2] https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/duckduckgo.com

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.

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.

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.

If there are any investors reading this - maybe it's a good time to reach out?

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

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

>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.

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 :/

> 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_m...

> 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-...

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.

> 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

> Mozilla had a difficult time trying to break the golden cage they find themselves in.

They could have partnered with Yahoo (and in fact did, at least temporarily), or Bing, or DuckDuckGo. Any of these search engines would be chomping at the bit to become the default for a browser as popular as Firefox.

> Ghostery will continue to operate normally.

Good to hear :)

> There's a lot of FUD regarding this. We outline what happened here: <Link provided>

Yep, I still stand by the statement that it was a debacle and was a poor decision by Mozilla. All parties should have known that users wouldn't appreciate the privacy violation and as a user of Firefox it was disheartening to see.

For what it's worth, I also still stand behind the idea that this just dropped search diversity and user options. There also seems like other things that Cliqz did helped further user privacy and rights. Sad to see that go

> There's a lot of FUD regarding this.

It ain't FUD if it's true: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cliqz-recommendations-f...

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.

they don't care they want money now.

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

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

Android - https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-android

Android (NextGen, was planned for release next month) - https://github.com/cliqz/daisy

Destkop - https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-f

There is much more on our Github organizations: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/ 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.

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.

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

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.

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-i...

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".

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-...

---

[0] Adblocker (fastest there is): 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-witho...

[2] Anti-Phishing: 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-da...

[4]: Human Web Code: 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...

[6]: HPN: https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-04/human-web-proxy-network...

I know that Cliqz initially sourced clickstream data from companies outside the EU (in particular Isreal) to build its search index on. Most of this data was not acquired with the informed consent of the users, who were "donating" it unwittingly through browser extensions they had installed. I think this eventually led Cliqz to build its own extensions and acquire Ghostery, which had amassed an enormous stockpile of personal data (related to cookies in particular) using a similar scheme. So I'd say a little skepticism is warranted, even though it's possible that Cliqz really turned the boat around later in terms of respecting user privacy.

> There's no way to link any two messages with one another making it impossible to build profiles out of the data.

Then what's the point of collecting the data in the first place?

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

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

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

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

DDG is going, "Am I a joke to you?"

DDG also depends on Bing somewhat.

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.

DDG doesn't operate their own index, they use Bing.

IIRC, they do actually have their own index too.

Source for their own index?

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-...

Looks to be answered by someone at DDG confirming it.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/du...

Seems like DDG would be going "we're an obvious candidate to benefit from that".

Or maybe not, I have no idea the technical details.

Private Search [1] is also not based on Google or Bing.

[1] https://private.sh

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

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.

As a German, to me the name always sounded scammy.

Hah! So much for my attempt to be generous.

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_b...

[2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_m...

> 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.

Yes, the default installers from chip.de were embedding Cliqz and used malware distribution techniques to have Cliqz stealthily installed along with other software. The important part is that Chip and Cliqz are owned by the same parent company, Hubert Burda Media.

I wasn't referring to the official .NET Framework installer either that's shipped by Microsoft.

TIL about Hubert Burda Media. They also own Cyberport, Focus, HolidayCheck, the German Huffington Post and Xing.

To me as a native English speaker, I don't get "clique" - it both sounds and looks like some kind of scammy ad company though. The name just exudes sleeze. I've seen the name several times on HN, and would never have guessed it was a search engine!

'Cliques' sounds less sleazy than 'clicks'. Cliqz somehow sounds like the website equivalent of a video porn booth, just in the search industry instead.

Definitely doesn't sound better to German ears. It always sounded like some scammy browser plugin or toolbar from the 90s.

Should have gone with Queery

If you're looking for opportunities, we have an opening in our branding department, where I think your talents will fit well.

People mocked the name "Google" as impossibly silly when they first launched. (And did you see their first logo [1]?) Names mean absolutely nothing.

[1] https://cdn.digitfreak.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/google...

But... "Cliqz" sounds like an existing word that does mean something? So?

Google sounds like googol.

Okay, but "Google" doesn't sound like a stereotypical spyware company.

...alright, maybe it does now, but still.

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

Did they have a casual company culture?

Why is that relevant?

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

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" :)

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.

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?

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.

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!

I'll note that the "Google" name doesn't convey the idea of search. So even by your own standards it's not very good.

I also suspect you weren't around for Google's debut. The name wasn't what made it better than its many competitors. It was the enormously better product. If anything, they succeeded despite the name, which was goofy-sounding and an obscure nerd reference that maybe 1% of their audience would get. And since then they've stayed in the lead through continuous product innovation, not because nobody could think of a better name.

"google", the name, was inspired by "googol", the SI-prefix, meaning 10^100. so "google" means, more or less, "a massive amount" -- which is perfect for a search tool.

there's also the "goggles" connection.

Yes, that's what I meant when I said "obscure nerd reference that maybe 1% of their audience would get".

For what it's worth, I don't think it's an SI prefix, just a named large number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol

If 'googol' is in the general public's lexicon now (doubtful) it certainly wasn't back then.

It wasn't really "inspired", the person looking up potential domain names just spelled it wrong and they decided to stick with it: https://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html

I remember the first time I heard of Google, and the first time I used it being many months apart. I only remember that because of the name managing to stick having never seen the actual search engine.

I don't think a great name helped "search.com", which was owned by CNet[5] at the time and has probably been handed off countless times since.

I think I started using google back around '99, and what I recall is first noting that compared to competitors[1][3][4], Google's home page was very clean.[2]

So while the search results were objectively better, that initial experience set my expectations.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/19990225143054/http://www.altavi...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/19990221160537/http://www.google...

[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/19990225111300/http://www2.askje...

[4]: https://web.archive.org/web/19990208021747/http://yahoo.com/

[5]: https://web.archive.org/web/19990208010139/http://search.cne...

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

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