
Cliqz is shutting down - kenty
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-i-learned-cliqz-victoria-gassmann/
======
throwaway914892
Cliqz was a hypocritical product right from the start, and it never attracted
a large userbase. The only reason it survived that long because the company
behind Cliqz didn't care about throwing lots of money into the idea of
creating a competition to google.

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.

~~~
solso
Just for archive reasons. There are some interesting points worth addressing
(IMHO). Of course I worked at Cliqz :-)

"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.

~~~
jszymborski
Did Cliqz ever consider bootstrapping with Bing/Google/Yandex results?
Supplement Cliqz results with those backends until Cliqz results got as good
as you wanted them to be?

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).

~~~
solso
Yes, but once you have such a strong dependency it's difficult to remove it.
Others have tried the approach and are still stuck with them.

Sorry to hear that the quality was not good for you, it depends on country to
country (depending on the users-base basically). For Germany, quality was good
enough, QA analysis on stratified queries backed it up. That being said,
perceived quality from a person is not properly reflected on NDCG-like
metrics, you do not remember the 9 queries it did right, but the one that was
totally off.

In any case, DDG is good, and let me emphasize, they (and others) provide a
lot of value to the users, privacy-concerned or otherwise. But the underlying
problem is not getting fixed, unless, hopefully someday, they come up with an
independent index (let's hope).

------
tpmx
Wow. From that team photo alone it looks like they had ~100 employees.

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Burda_Media)

~~~
r721
Some of their posts were quite popular on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=0x65.dev](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=0x65.dev)

------
pmontra
I'm a little sad about it. I've been using Cliqz from the browser search bar
for a few months only because it's not Google. I'm probably switching to DDG
now.

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.

~~~
chispamed
If you are searching for privacy-focused Google seaarch alternatives and are
not happy with DDG, you may want to give Qwant
([https://www.qwant.com](https://www.qwant.com), best one regarding privacy
I've found so far but since the quarantine began it's been a bit slow) or
Startpage ([https://startpage.com](https://startpage.com), they actually show
you google results) a try as well.

~~~
hellcow
Startpage was acquired by an ad company: [https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-
buyout-ad-tech-company/](https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-
company/).

------
dorkwood
Up until a certain threshold, I think company names are unimportant and one
can succeed despite having a silly name. But once a company steps over that
threshold with a name like "Cliqz", it becomes difficult to overcome the
embarrassment you're generating whenever someone has to read or say your
company name out loud.

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.

~~~
robotnikman
Cliqz sounds like a name of a toy marketed to girls.

------
skyfaller
I'm sorry to see this, I was looking forward to their Android web browser that
intended to support the Dat protocol:

\- [https://github.com/cliqz/cliqz-concept-
browser](https://github.com/cliqz/cliqz-concept-browser)

\- [https://github.com/cliqz/daisy](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/](https://github.com/bunsenbrowser/bunsen/)
)

~~~
pfraze
Beaker's going to finally release a new version in ~2 weeks. No solution to
the mobile browser yet, but I hope somebody will pick up the mantle from Cliqz
and Busnen.

------
chris_f
I spent a good amount of time using Cliqz. For creating their own search
index, it was pretty good. But it was nowhere near as good as Google or Bing,
and to the average end-user that's all that matters. Most people don't really
care about the engineering behind a tool, they just want the tool to work.

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/](https://www.mojeek.com/)

~~~
onli
The search really wasn't bad. I made some test searches and wrote a small
article about it, comparing the results. Cliqz did really well in it. Not
everything was perfect, but neither was Google. I was impressed enough to use
them as my own search engine and that worked just fine. Sure, sometimes
necessary to switch over, but that's the same with ddg. I would have loved to
see how they'd perform in a few years.

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](https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/farewell-from-cliqz) is maybe a more
fitting link target for the submission with the current title (dang?).

------
ddevault
Good riddance. "Privacy-oriented" is the most egregious tagline I've ever seen
from a company like Cliqz. Their real motus operandi was spying on users for
targeted ads.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox)

~~~
dontbenebby
Wow, I came in to joke we know DuckDuckGo must be doing well if it's killing
competitors but _sheesh_.

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.

------
itcrowd
> Some of the back-burner [marketing] ideas were: Changing the Cliqz name,
> turning the browser colors to pick for Valentine’s day, advertising on porn
> websites (okay, that one made it).

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.

~~~
rjkennedy98
It makes total sense for a privacy-oriented to advertise there. It's the same
reason VPNs advertise on pirate bay.

------
heipei
For what it's worth, their engineering blog about how to build a large-scale
search engine more or less from scratch was really interesting:
[https://0x65.dev/](https://0x65.dev/)

~~~
prox
Weren’t there a bunch of posts on HN by them?

~~~
chris_f
Yeah, I believe in December they did a post a day. A lot of the posts made it
to the front page.

------
MrGilbert
Ok, so it's kind of difficult to compete with Google. I get that. How about
building decentralized search engines? Basically ActivityPub, but for search
engines.

Any known efforts in this direction?

~~~
thekyle
There is YaCy which has pretty terrible results but is P2P. There used to be a
P2P search engine called FAROO that was better but seems to have been
shutdown.

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...](https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has-the-best-
results/)

~~~
MrGilbert
I remember YaCy, yes... I tried it once, and wasn't convinced.

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.

------
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/)

Farewell, au revoir.

------
bsder
Can we please just get the old AltaVista graphical clustering back in a search
engine? Please?

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.

------
smoyer
I tried Cliqz for a day and didn't find the results useful (so I went back to
DDG.)

------
Hoasi
It is shutting down and this is the first time I even hear about it.

------
floatingatoll
More discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23043785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23043785)

------
dessant
> Cliqz lost the fight against Google. There’s no way to sugarcoat this.

> 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.

~~~
solso
Cliqz never masqueraded anything, only in your odd perception of the world.
Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other
ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted. The same goes for
data-collection, you can collect all and put the privacy of the users at risk,
or collect only signals that cannot be record-linked, which is what Cliqz did.

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.

~~~
yellowapple
> Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other
> ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox](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.

~~~
solso
This claim on the Wikipedia is factually incorrect: "This data is tied to a
unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance."

Thanks for noticing it, we will create an issue.

UUIDs only applies to telemetry, which is not the data being described in the
paragraph: queries, scrolling, amount time spend, urls, etc. For this kind of
user data (HumanWeb) there is no uuid, neither implicit or explicit.

There are plenty of papers on the topic, independent audits, the code is open-
source and the data can be inspected. HumanWeb data is 100% record-unlikable,
we have no way to know if two messages received come from the same person or
not.

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
> we have no way to know if two messages received come from the same person or
> not.

This is accurate. They partnered with us at FoxyProxy to prevent browser
telemetry from revealing users' IP addresses and other metadata.

These guys are above board and even if there may have been a problem in 2017
with Firefox, that was no longer the case in 2018, 2019, and 2020. They bent
over backwards and jumped through many hoops to hide their users' identity.
They were very interested in the solving the engineering problem around
anonymization. I know this from first-hand experience.

This is a loss larger than many people realize. There are so few companies
with such integrity and who put their users first, above profits or
shareholders.

~~~
solso
There were no problems in 2017 or before, we were doing the same exactly the
same during Firefox times (we went through security and privacy audits). Data
collection is and always was safe wrt to privacy.

Why the ruckus then? Because some assume that is data is sent, privacy is
compromised, period. They do not know how to do it, and they assume it's
impossible. Instead of checking the claims for themselves (code is public,
data can be inspected, documentation, etc.) they prefer to stick to their
belief system, which is more comfortable and does not imply hard work. The
press release that FF -- written by one of these people with a lot of biases
and published without review -- did not help as it was misleading.

We did a big mistake back then. Instead of rebutting it, we chose to ignore
the FUD assuming that facts would prevail. They did not.

Sadly the community is "scared", we have been congratulated and lauded by
anyone who checked our systems. But never endorsed in public, there is little
to gain and a lot to lose (you are getting a sneak preview right now).

Sad story, extremely frustrating too, but there is nothing we can do now.

~~~
yellowapple
> Why the ruckus then? Because some assume that is data is sent, privacy is
> compromised, period. They do not know how to do it, and they assume it's
> impossible. Instead of checking the claims for themselves (code is public,
> data can be inspected, documentation, etc.) they prefer to stick to their
> belief system, which is more comfortable and does not imply hard work.

If my eyes rolled any harder I'd likely pull a muscle.

Let's dissect this a bit:

> Because some assume that is data is sent, privacy is compromised, period.

It ain't about it being _sent_ (though that's bad, too). It's about it being
collected _at all_. Cliqz collects and aggregates my data _somewhere_ , and
that is therefore a violation of my privacy, even if (for now) it's on my
local machine (I could certainly routinely delete that collected data, much
like I do with cache and cookies, but then what's the point of using Cliqz in
the first place?).

> Instead of checking the claims for themselves (code is public, data can be
> inspected, documentation, etc.)

I _have_ checked the claims for myself (to the best of my ability). None of
them address the very real concern of the aggregated data being, you know,
aggregated. Just because it's on my local machine doesn't mean it's guaranteed
to stay that way; every second it's on my machine is a liability that anyone
who's privacy-conscious would want to eliminate (and anyone who's _not_
privacy-conscious doesn't care about).

Like, there's no argument that Cliqz's HumanWeb is at least _less_ evil than
traditional tracking systems, but it still relies on aggregation of data, and
that is still a massive privacy hazard. Not to mention that the data that _is_
sent¹ is still rich with datapoints that could be used for fingerprinting (the
papers seem to suggest there are "heuristics" to detect and anonymize this,
but said papers are pretty light on detail, and source code is meaningless
since we don't know if it's what's actually running server-side). And also not
to mention the rather sketchy distribution methods, like piggybacking on .NET
downloads via chip.de in a manner that's been a hallmark of spyware since Y2K.

> they prefer to stick to their belief system, which is more comfortable and
> does not imply hard work.

"Am I out of touch? No, it is the children who are wrong."

\----

> Sad story, extremely frustrating too, but there is nothing we can do now.

Not with that attitude. The search engine technology y'all developed is pretty
interesting from a technical standpoint, and could be put to use (I'm sure DDG
would be interested in adding it to their mix, or perhaps Ecosia could use it
to diversify their Bing/Yahoo results the way DDG does with their in-house
crawler). Same with Ghostery's more efficient network request blocking engine²
(though it seems like Ghostery's development is still ongoing, no?), which
could be useful in other ad and tracker blockers. Neither of these are much in
the way of money-makers (well, maybe the search one is, if y'all license it),
but it'll at least help make the best of a lousy situation.

I get that it sucks - I've similarly felt the pain of a product into which
I've put my blood, sweat, and tears ultimately failing. It's easy to write off
the detractors and critics as simply uninformed masses who just "didn't
understand how great of a product we have". It's harder to admit that the
product wasn't great, or the name was terrible, or the market wasn't as big as
anticipated, or what have you.

I'm confident that being the bright and enthusiastic people y'all are, you'll
find your footing again. Just, um, try to come up a name that doesn't scream
"adware" like "Cliqz MyOffrz" next time, lol. And maybe instead of writing off
your criticisms as "FUD", actually examine why those criticisms persist and
what you can do to better address them.

\----

¹:
[https://cliqz.com/en/whycliqz/transparency](https://cliqz.com/en/whycliqz/transparency)

²:
[https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html](https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html)

