
The Cliqz Story Is Over - marban
https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/farewell-from-cliqz
======
floatingatoll
Yesterday's discussion about this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031520)

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

~~~
chris_f
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&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1577829600&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1575237600&page=0&prefix=false&query=0x65.dev)

------
TedDoesntTalk
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.

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

~~~
hardwaresofton
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.

------
stereolambda
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.

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

~~~
hinkley
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...

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

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

------
flyGuyOnTheSly
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
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.

------
tannhaeuser
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
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.

------
rakoo
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

------
gentleman11
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

------
state_throw_2
>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.

------
igneo676
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 :/

~~~
__ka
> 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-...](https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-11/the-pivot-that-excited-
mozilla-and-google.html)

~~~
metajack
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
> 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)

~~~
yellowapple
> 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.

------
_236436532
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
they don't care they want money now.

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

~~~
chrmod
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
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.

------
gfodor
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)

------
lykahb
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.

------
bzb3
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...](https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-in-
firefox/)

~~~
__ka
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-...](https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-11/the-pivot-that-excited-
mozilla-and-google.html)

\---

[0] Adblocker (fastest there is): [https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-20/not-
all-adblockers-are-...](https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-20/not-all-
adblockers-are-born-equal.html)

[1] Algorithmic anti-tracking (first and only):
[https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-19/blocking-tracking-
witho...](https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-19/blocking-tracking-without-
blocking-trackers.html)

[2] Anti-Phishing: [https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-21/anti-phishing-with-
priv...](https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-21/anti-phishing-with-privacy-in-
mind.html)

[3] Human Web: [https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting-
da...](https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting-data-in-a-
socially-responsible-manner.html)

[4]: Human Web Code: [https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-
core/tree/master/module...](https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-
core/tree/master/modules/human-web)

[5]: Is Data Collection Evil: [https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-
collection-evil...](https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-
evil.html)

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

~~~
_ta_231331951
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.

------
js4ever
Are you going to release some work done or is it going to disappear?

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

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

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

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

~~~
GordonS
IIRC, they do actually have their own index too.

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
Source for their own index?

~~~
hundchenkatze
[https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/du...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/duckduckbot/)

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

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

~~~
dessant
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...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74vt08/psa_huber_burda_media_the_majority_owner_of_cliqz/)

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

~~~
nullymcnull
> 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.

~~~
dessant
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.

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

------
dzonga
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

------
artsyca
Did they have a casual company culture?

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
Why is that relevant?

~~~
artsyca
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

------
akersten
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" :)

~~~
wpietri
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.

~~~
woodrowbarlow
"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.

~~~
wpietri
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol)

------
kirse
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)

