
The world needs more search engines - kkm
https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-01/the-world-needs-cliqz-the-world-needs-more-search-engines.html
======
bko
Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best
at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time
after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what
I'm looking for.

For instance:

"the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman"

ddg:

Tom Holland (side bar)

Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb)

Tom Holland (wiki)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (imdb)

google:

Jonathan Kimble Simmons (splash, link to wiki)

J. Jonah Jameson (wiki)

J. K. Simmons (wiki)

The google result is exactly what I want. And the results were made in
incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information
about me as a user.

At the end of the day, most people care about the product. I'm only willing to
sacrifice so much to satisfy the ideal that there should be less
concentration. Make a better search engine but trying to pull at the heart-
strings of users about how Google is an empire and too powerful just won't
work and it undermines your product and mission.

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
_> And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat
with privileged information about me as a user._

that's not what Incognito mode does. It prevents your search from being
included in the browsing history and doesn't send cookies from active
sessions, but that's about it. Google still knows this is you being
unauthenticated. You don't need to be logged into google to be reliably
targeted with ads that fit your profile.

~~~
jefftk
Why do you think Google Search still knows who you are when you search in
Incognito mode? (Or, in Firefox, if you open a private browsing window.) How
would it know?

There are advertising companies that use fingerprinting for ad targeting, but
Google doesn't.

(Disclosure: I work at Google on ads, speaking only for myself)

~~~
Terretta
How does it know to offer (in incognito mode) a list of your accounts you
might want to re-login to? (Not always, but often enough to raise an eyebrow.)

Seems like a pretty good reason to think it still knows who you are.

As to how that works, you tell us.

~~~
jefftk
Are you talking about the browser's autocomplete? That's not something servers
can detect unless you interact with it. Or do you mean something else?

~~~
hiccuphippo
No. On login Google shows you your email address so you can click on it and
only fill the password. Which means it knows you were logged in on that
browser previously.

~~~
jefftk
That shouldn't be possible in private browsing, unless you've previously
logged into Google in that same private session.

One way you could see something similar to this would be if you opened a clean
session, logged into Google, logged out of Google, thought you closed the last
incognito window but didn't, and then opened a new incognito window? Then the
user cookie would still be in client-side storage

------
weinzierl
I looked into the Cliqz browser a few years a ago. Back then they claimed to
be a privacy respecting alternative to Chrome. What I found back then is that
they sent every keystroke I type in the URL bar to their own servers. They
outright lied about that in their terms.

For me their mission is pretty clear: Google ate Burda's ad cookies and now
they are trying to get their hands into the cookie jar again. Given that today
we have widespread TLS adoption the war about the endpoint has begun. Cliqz,
alias Burda Media, is just another combatant - the one who controls the
browser controls the ads.

Previous thread with more info:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626790)

~~~
tpllaha
They have an autosuggest feature in the browser which shows search results as
you type. Goes without saying that this requires a request per keystroke. If
each request contained a unique user id, that would be concerning, but that is
not the case. that the search query itself goes to their servers is just
common sense, but those requests are anonymized. (Disclaimer: I'm a former
employee)

~~~
hu3
Keystrokes + IP = NSA knows exactly what I'm typing.

This "feature" should be off by default on any software that claims to be a
privacy respecting alternative to Chrome.

~~~
Aeolun
Can you ID someone positively by their typing patterns and an IP?

~~~
clarry
You most likely can. Just listening to people type on a keyboard gives a very
unique feel with each person. Try it sometime, listen to family members and
colleagues type or find some youtube video. I can ID all my family members and
some coworkers by the sound of their typing.

Obviously, if you can get the content of what they're typing, it gets much
easier still. I think I've seen papers where they ID programmers based on the
code they've produced. This applies to other types of writing too.

You can build a model from keystroke timings and figure out people's SSH
passwords too.
[https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec01/full_papers/song/...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec01/full_papers/song/song.pdf)

~~~
jonathankoren
Now do it with random network jitter.

The main problem here is that even if you could do it, why would you? There
are over 3.4 billion Internet users in the world. Given that people share IP
addresses and even browsers, what's the actually gain identifying someone
through typeahead search keystroke jitter? This would spend a lot of effort,
and and then tell you what that a cookie doesn't?

I can't imagine that it's actually worth the effort.

------
freediver
It is impressive what they built. The results are quite good! The UI shows
innovative elements like trackers used on the page.

I see two problems with their approach:

1\. The product is not built with the 'grandma test' mindset.

More sliders and widgets is not what your grandma wants in a search engine.
This is why building a search engine is hard. You have to guess with very
little information what the user wants and get it in front of them at first
try, without the user having to tweak anything.

2\. Google must not fall because it is a monopoly. If it was to fall it should
be because someone built a better product.

Similar to how ICE cars had "monopoly" over transportation and the time for
change has thankfully come. Not because monopolies are bad, but because
electric cars are so freaking awesome.

Google perfected what the 'best search engine' is to 99% of population. This
comes at an expense of really annoying 1% of users but it is the price they
are willing to pay. To de-throne Google you really need to cater to broad
population with a product that will be better both at capturing intent and
delivering and presenting relevant results. This may or not come with a
different business model.

~~~
helpPeople
The search results have gotten noticably worse in the last year.

When a Wikipedia/encyclopedia article is what I'm looking for, why is Google
showing articles?

Wikipedia used to be the top result.

~~~
LMYahooTFY
SEO is my first guess?

I've noticed things on the spectrum of articles <-> blogspam crowding out the
top results in many queries, and that it's substantially more difficult to
find forum content discussing related topics to the query. It's a shame, as I
think there is often more interesting content on such forums.

~~~
stevenicr
Anti-SEO is my first guess, that and tweaking for fears of regulation or bad
non-grown-up PR...

Google's algo changes since about panda have been burying good web sites and
content while bringing quicker answers and 'sanitized' aka semi-censored
results to the top.

Some of this is over reaction to SEO and trying to out do the spammers - but
the collateral damage to the results and thus the end users who believe that
google brings the truth is hard to calculate.

Combine that with regulation like dmca, right to be forgotten and others..
results are even more censored, and the general population does not know what
they are not seeing, as they still trust google to be bringing the truth.

worry about bad PR from various factions - tweak the algorithms.. and you can
say for sure that the results the more adolescent google brought a decade ago
were often more of what people were looking for.. and the results today are
often like cheap irradiated / sanitized snacks, not the full enchilada that
was once a G search away.

Much of this started happening when whats his name became that adult in the
room and started putting the finger on the scale to change what millions could
find, it's gotten more and more censored every update since then, and less
transparent about that.

in my biased opinion.. your searches and the results will vary. I still use
other engines for different things, and I feel strongly that we need more
search engines. Anyone who wants to create a better adult engine, let me know.

------
lawrenceyan
This seems like a pretty blatant advertisement for their company's "Cliqz
Browser".

You should at least acknowledge your bias by being transparent enough to show
you have a vested interest. It's really disingenuous otherwise, and makes it
hard to take what you have to say at face value.

~~~
jefftk
It seems more like an advertisement/justification/explanation for their search
engine?

~~~
lawrenceyan
Yes, according to the post, the "primary benefit" of using Cliqz is so that
you can get access to their search engine, which is exclusive to their
browser.

~~~
pythux
That is factually incorrect: [https://beta.cliqz.com](https://beta.cliqz.com)

~~~
lawrenceyan
You're right, instead of saying exclusive feature I should have stuck with
'primary'. I can see how those two words have different enough meanings to
cause confusion.

Though it's important to remember that not everyone on here has English as
their first language, and we should generally be considerate of that when
reading people's comments.

------
kbyatnal
There needs to be a new search engine focused on the niche of people who hate
the current ad spam/SEO results that Google currently returns. A query like
"best headphones" returns results like "The Best Headphones for 2019 |
PCMag.com".

They've clearly optimized for the mass user base, since the average person is
probably fine with a result like that. But I'm willing to bet no one on HN
would ever click a link like that, just because of how "spammy" it feels.

When I search for something like "best headphones", my ideal results would be
forum/discussion posts (eg. like "Ask HN") where I can read what other
programmers/hackers are using, their experience with it, etc. And that's the
problem with trying to make a one-size-fits-all search engine - it isn't
possible to make everyone happy.

I've actually been working on a product to solve this exact problem. The best
comparison would be the old "discussions" filter that Google used to have
until they removed it. I'd love to show more people and get feedback. If this
is something you'd be interested in trying, drop your email here (
[https://degoogle.typeform.com/to/QzVy7c](https://degoogle.typeform.com/to/QzVy7c)
) and I'll send you the beta

~~~
ngold
The discussions button would be 90% of my search if was available. Maybe a
filter for popular boards like reddit or hn would be a game changer.

~~~
kbyatnal
Yep, same for me. Did you put your email in the link above? I'd love to chat
more about this and show you what I've been working on

------
pmontra
Some feedbacks about the product.

I made some typical searches I do in my job. They returned reasonable results.
Impossible to know if they are better or worse than Google. I need some days
of usage. I'll do my best to keep using it this week.

Maybe autodecting the language would help. It gave me a German page without
any obvious way to change to English.

I went to the settings, changed the language and discovered that it wants to
know my country. I left Germany because it looks like profiling and I don't
want to help them at it.

Then I disabled every feature (news, weather, etc). I'm interested into a
search engine, not into a portal from the 90s.

However I'm afraid that Cookies Autodelete and other privacy extensions will
delete those settings and I'll have to do it again. I'll probably hide them
with uBlock Origin. For the language a URL ending with something like ?lang=en
would be great for bookmarks.

And finally, do we need more independent search engines? Yes, definitely.

~~~
__ka
Many thanks for the feedback. We'll add the language autodetection for the
interface and results this week. There is no profiling taking place. The
country is just to select what index you would like results from - we'll try
to make the UI better.

This is still beta, so please keep on using it and we'd love to hear more
feedback [beta@cliqz.com].

~~~
Aeolun
I second the need to do some form of detection for language. My browser tells
webpages I want results in english (Accept-language header), and this can be
safely used to detect what is most appropriate initially.

If not that, then at least IP, considering I’m sitting in the US.

~~~
kwhitefoot
No, please do not use IP addresses to infer UI language preference. Google
does that and it a right royal pain in the arse. Every time I visit a
different country Blogger's log in page is in a different language ignoring
the carefully specified browser settings giving me Polish when I am in Poland,
Norwegian when I am in Norway, etc.

------
seektable
We don't need more search engines _like_ google, we need a new kind of engines
that will supersede google/bing/etc and break the following axioms:

* search engine is a cloud service, which is not controlled by user of that engine

* search gives final results in milliseconds (why? because google cannot spend many seconds/minutes for you, that's why)

* search creates information bubble (that user cannot control) because it tires to satisfy user's expectations

Most likely this new 'google-killer' will be:

* open source, because user should trust the code

* self-hosted (easily deployed in a click), not a cloud SaaS. Our search preferences have ultimate value, no one should have an access to it

* more useful than google because of accumulated data about _you_ that are processed by computational knowledge engine (something like WolframAlpha)

* background reasoning - this engine can work continuously and utilize your own computational resources on notebook/PC and bring you brand new search insights that google never will be able to deliver (because they cannot dedicate a lot of computational resources for _each_ google user).

Sounds good, isn't it?.. Maybe this kind of software already exists, could
someone point me out?

~~~
biasedOpinion
Disclaimer: I work at Google so I'm 100% biased. All opinions are my own.
Edit: formatting

>search engine is a cloud service, which is not controlled by user of that
engine

So is hacker news.

>search gives final results in milliseconds (why? because google cannot spend
many seconds/minutes for you, that's why)

Do you want latency to be larger??

>open source, because user should trust the code

That would make it easier for SEOs to game the system. Or perhaps it would put
everyone on a level playing field. I'm not sure.

>self-hosted (easily deployed in a click), not a cloud SaaS.

Do you mean users should keep their own index of the whole web by themselves?

>more useful than google because of accumulated data about you that are
processed by computational knowledge engine

First I think you greatly overestimate how useful information about you can
be. Second if that worked then it would make they problem you mentioned before
(information bubble) worse...

~~~
seektable
> Do you want latency to be larger??

Instant results are good for sure, however very often few more seconds - in
addition to instant results! - is not a problem if _late_ , more carefully
processed results can save _minutes_ of my time - for now I spend it for
opening the links and scanning the content with my eyes.

The same is about not very often but important searches that may be described
as 'research about something', in this case I'm ready to make complex, well
detailed query and wait even _hours_ \- then back and get well organized and
intelligent results.

> Do you mean users should keep their own index of the whole web by
> themselves?

oh no! Users should keep only their personal data - in wide meaning, this
includes all history of searches, search results, refinements, anything that
ML currently uses to bring personal search experience. In addition to that,
relatively small index of _important_ content may be saved. For internet
search this 'personal search' will use API of anything that can be used
_manually_ for now - google, bing, consume direct API of
Twitter/FB/Medium/WolframAlpha and hundreds of connectors to other cloud
services. It is important to say, that this 'delegated search calls' may be
anonymized.

It will be important that search results are _not_ limited only by what google
decided to be 'top results for this user'. At this moment I can do all this
manually - open N tabs, query many services, compare results, open most
'relevant' (from my human point of view, not google) links and scan them for
most interesting information. I believe that all this can be automated.

> First I think you greatly overestimate how useful information about you can
> be. Second if that worked then it would make they problem you mentioned
> before (information bubble) worse...

As for now, all this just thoughts. I'm a programmer with almost 20YOE; I have
understanding about how google works _in general_ , how _lucene_ works, how
_WolframAlpha_ works, modern approaches to NLP and search-driven queries
processing, and I think - without a MVP that works, this is more belief, of
course - that value of this 'personal computation engine' combined with modern
ML approaches might be ultimate. Challenge, but nothing impossible!

------
meerita
I'm more than happy with DuckDuckGo. I would love more specialized search
engines. Back in the day I've used several search engines depending the task i
needed to perform, from Altavista to Yahoo to Google.

~~~
netfl0
Beat me to it! Very happy here as well. I also love the bang short cuts. I am
actually at the point where google is clearly inferior.

I will grant that Google has a more intelligent indexing and ranking of Stack
Overflow. However, DDG is making major progress there, and I rarely need to
add !g

Pro tip: with the bang shortcuts, you can add them anywhere in your query, it
does not need to be in the beginning of your query string.

~~~
buzzerbetrayed
I’ve tried switching to ddg a number of times in the past. Every time the same
thing happens:

“This result isn’t that great. I’m going to !g just this once”

Then, one week later I’m adding !g to literally every singe search so I switch
back to google because what’s the point?

I really do hope to one day get off of google though.

~~~
visarga
I use StartPage.com which is based on Google but strips the private data.

~~~
DavideNL
"Startpage is now owned by an advertising company" :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577)

------
arrosenberg
How do you design regulation that holds the giants accountable, doesn't impair
smaller companies' ability to enter/innovate in the space, and isn't quickly
corruptible by the (well-resourced) companies you are trying to control?

We're better served by breaking them up and enforcing and strengthening the
pro-competition laws on the books. The government has a pretty mixed record
with regulating industry, and a far more impressive record of investigation,
enforcement, and prosecution - corporate break-ups are far more in the
wheelhouse. Regulation requires constant vigilance, whereas a breakup is self-
executing once the case is won.

It's not anti-success rhetoric, so much as an acknowledgement that tech has
become increasingly concentrated and anti-democratic. The Sherman Act was
passed in 1890 - these aren't "knee jerk" solutions - they've worked
effectively in the past to curb corporate abuses.

~~~
xixixao
My biggest problem is: How do you break up a software system? I understand how
you break up a company that mines ore, produces steel, builds railways, runs
transportation - those are all separable ventures that can negotiate contracts
almost as easily as when they had a single owner.

But the tech giants run a single system: Amazon in the delivery, FB in the
social graph (DB), Google in the knowledge graph. Those would be incredibly
hard technically to break up. The less technically complicated split would
mean that one new company has all the revenue and the other has all the costs.

I haven’t heard any credible proposal on how this “breakup” would actually
physically work. If anyone has links to good sources I’d be interested.

~~~
david-gpu
Say Alphabet and its myriad of ad-supported services, such as Youtube. Instead
of serving first-party ads, they would need to serve third-party ads, or
charge their users, or a combination of the two (e.g. freemium model).

The facebook conglomerate could similarly be broken into Instagram, Facebook,
etc. Each would get a portion of their current ad business unit.

In terms of software, each baby Facebook could get a flexible royalty-free
license to all the software currently owned by Facebook, and they would be
free to derive from it to differentiate over time.

If there is a will, there is a way.

~~~
DonHopkins
They should break Alphabet up into 26 different companies, each getting a
different letter.

~~~
type0
This is the best logical conclusion so far

------
throwawayy98121
Sad that such a blatant ad makes it to front page of HN. Not sure how much I
trust Google, but I trust these guys even less. The blog is an emotional rant.
Not a single example of Google breaking anti trust laws. Translation - instead
of competing by making a better product, we want our competitors to be taken
out by government.

~~~
eino
That Google doesn't break any anti-trust law is missing the point. The post
doesn't say Google is illegal. It says even though legal, there are many
issues with one source controlling all access to information.

Every week we have posts about new products, often self-posted. If they're
upvoted, it's that people find it interesting. Quite ironic writing the blog
is an emotional rant (that I would disagree with, I find it quite argumented),
while your whole comment is whining that people upvote things that you don't
agree with.

------
seanwilson
I feel the problem most people have when thinking about monopolies is if a
monopoly produces a product that people like right now (e.g. they like the
features, they like the cost), people don't see the monopoly as a problem and
even will even defend it thinking it's great ("I love company X, they make
amazing products, they deserve their success!").

The problem with monopolies is when the company decides to e.g. price gouge or
gets lazy by not innovating. Companies can only really get away with this and
survive when they have a monopoly.

Monopolies also kill competing products and deter other companies from even
attempting to enter the market - so you might love the product of a monopoly
right now but if the monopoly had never existed an even better product could
be available today.

I think people generally love Google's products but it would be good to see
more competition. The upfront investment you would need to create a competing
search engine is prohibitively high so most companies aren't going to attempt
to make their own.

~~~
tschakkaMarc
Hi, Marc from Cliqz (and one of the authors of the linked article): We at
Cliqz do try and others (like mojeek in the UK or Seznam in Czech) are trying
as well. But yes, it has very high costs. We did a lot of (I find smart)
technical shortcuts (and will explain how in the next days in our blog), but
it is still an investment. The main hurdle is however distribution. As said in
the article, Google spends 1/4 of their revenue to block market access and
this makes the investment case nearly impossible. It's their strategy to stop
competitive innovation. This no company can solve and why e.g., in Europe you
do see the 93% market share of Google. This is where this becomes a political
topic. In fact since search tends to be a natural monopoly and information is
so important this is where politics has to regulate and ensure competition. In
an ideal world there would be 4-5 competing search engines in every region ...

~~~
techslave
search is not close to being a natural monopoly. you are vastly
underestimating how strong google’s execution has been. perhaps because you
need to convince yourself that you could compete, “if only” ...

~~~
tschakkaMarc
One doesn't exclude the other. I admire a lot of what Google has done and
agree on a very strong execution. This still doesn't change the fact, that a
search engine (1) gets better with every query-click pair and hence favors the
market leader, (2) is a highly profitable business, which allows to buy
distribution (this is the biggest market entry barrier), and (3) there are
many small points that add up (crawler access is one minor but annoying issue:
Web-Sites very often see all crawlers except Google and Bing as "bad
scrapers"; so small companies need to invest a lot of time to convince them to
get access and many will still never allow it what users then rate as bad
quality) ... but, yes, Google is doing a lot of things right, they have very
good people. Many of them my friends or ex-colleagues. This still doesn't
change the fact of the original article: A 93% market share is not great.

------
jefftk
I played with the search engine some, and I'm surprised how behind their crawl
is for my blog and some blogs I follow. For example, it looks like it last
indexed www.jefftk.com in August 2017, compared to Bing and Google which
crawled it this month. www.benkuhn.net looks like Summer 2017.
pedestrianobservations.com looks like April 2019. apenwarr.ca looks like
January 2019. No preview for danluu.com or sideways-view.com.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, not on search)

------
enitihas
I don't get the point. Doesn't the world already have search engines. Bing,
Yandex, DuckDuckGo. If the argument is these are not popular, then that is
surely not Google's fault. If the argument is Google's brand is more
entrenched in the minds of consumers, then it applies to all sorts of
companies and everything should be broken up, like Coke, since the world needs
more sugar water. Search engines, unlike social networks, have much less
network effects. Even if your family is using Google, you can use duck duck
go. That's not the case if they use iMessage or Facebook. If you aren't using
the same platform you might be cut off.

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
I agree mostly, but there's a little more to it.

Google Search is pretty well embedded into Android. You can use Baidu or
Yandex or Bing / DuckDuckGo on an Android phone, but there's substantially
more friction. Considering mobile is now more than 50% of search traffic and
Android is 80% of devices, that's close to 40% of all searches basically going
to Google for free.

Combine that with the fact that Google is embedded into Chrome -- which is
used by ~67% of web traffic -- and there's SOME friction to using a different
search engine:

You have to set your default to a different search engine, or go directly to
that page, rather than just type into your URL bar -- like most people do.

It's not hard to see that Google has a huge advantage.

~~~
enitihas
Why do you think Google is embedded into Chrome? I use ddg easily with chrome,
and as far as I remember, chrome allows you to change your search engine to
anything, even a nobody site, as oppposed to Safari, which only allows
selection from a fixed list of 4 on my Mac, so I can't use Yandex as my
default.

Desktop is dominated by windows, where bing search is embedded in the start
menu, from where it is non trivial to remove it, and changing it to something
else is not even possible.

How is there more friction on using another search engine on Android. What
other platform has an even lower friction in switching search engines?

~~~
saagarjha
> chrome allows you to change your search engine to anything

Which they mention a line below your quote.

~~~
enitihas
I am not disputing that, I am just asking how does any other browser make it
even easier.

------
sojmq
This is an advertisement for the Cliqz search engine. Let's remember that
Cliqz is the advertising company that the Mozilla Corporation sent our private
history browsing to back in the day:

[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/)

------
pcmaffey
I want to see niche search engines:

\- a search engine for blogs

\- a search engine for dev questions

\- a search engine for shopping

\- a search engine for diy

etc.

Im really tired of sites trying to centralize and own this content. The key to
decentralizing and empowering individuals to own their content is enabling
distribution and discovery. New search engines are essential to the web we
want.

~~~
buboard
google will neatly incorporate their results in their index and then people
will go back to searching in google. I mean it happens with all major sites
(stackoverflow, shopping results, diy/pinterest). Only twitter and facebook ,
who completely block their content from google get away. Perhaps we should
take a lesson or two from them.

~~~
aliakhtar
Tweets do show up in search though

------
garaetjjte
It's hard to take their "privacy by design" seriously. It is the same Cliqz
that partnered before with Mozilla to run "experiment" exfiltrating browsing
history (!) of 1% of new installs in Germany: [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/)

I thought Mozilla would loss all their credibility after this, but somehow
they still market as privacy-focused..

~~~
tschakkaMarc
Hi, Marc from Cliqz. This one haunts us (in HN and also in my dreams). Let's
first get one thing clear: It was a terrible blog post. Second: The 1% who had
Cliqz installed were actually safer than the ones without. Why? If you use a
(most) browsers every keystroke in the URL bar gets send to Google. This is
how autosuggest works. This was and is the case with Firefox also. Cliqz in
the functionally implemented in Firefox was not that different. Except - it
comes with privacy by design: We actually proxied those requests to not get
the IP, we take special measures to not collect private data in the first
place. And all this was tested and scrutinized a lot before and after the
test. And if you don't trust it or believe it, it also happened to be open
source. In the end, you were better off with Cliqz than without. Third (and
maybe most importantly): If you don't support anyone who "collects" data, even
if they do it in the most transparent way, without collecting any private
information, in fact going a long way to delete all PII, open-source and with
privacy by design, someone who has no business model built on collecting
profiles, then you only criticize Google, but will never have an alternative
or only alternatives that white label those that do collect all data. Because
building a search without data is impossible. We were hoping that together
with Firefox we would build a better solution. For some reasons this didn't
work out, but lack of privacy was never one of them (lack of a business model
more so, because sending every key press to some is more profitable than
others, regardless of how private each is). In fact, our way of doing things
is much more private than most people out there who claim to be private. This
includes most browsers and search engines. And all of this is open source, so
verifiable. And while we speak about it: In our blog
[https://0x65.dev](https://0x65.dev) we will over the next 24 days publish
pieces on what we do and why we do it and why it is important, data collection
and anonymization will be a big part of this. Last not least: All this is
clearly not your fault, so my rant might be inappropriate, but as I said, this
thing haunts us for the wrong reasons. (Me and the team are happy to answer
any questions).

~~~
garaetjjte
Obviously using search engine sends search queries to it.. okay. But that
experiment was sending most of browsing history, without explicit opt-in.
Collecting browsing history from users of popular browser without asking them
is just evil. (and it seems you still defend that decision)

~~~
tschakkaMarc
Yes, I’m defending it, because again: We took drastic steps to never send
anything private (like checking within the browser whether the URL is unique
or different if logged in or out and then never sending it, not to mention
that there of course was no identifier and we made record linkage impossible,
so no click profile, and much more). If in doubt we drop and don’t send. And
again – there were tons of (pen) tests and scrutiny to make sure no private
data point ever leaves your browser. It is built with the mindset “if it
reaches our server, we should technically not be able to identify any single
person or any surf pattern or any private URL” – this was and is also tested
by many (privacy) researchers before and after the experiment. And again, all
this was and is open source. This is way more than any industry standard, and
I simply don’t know of any company that works with data that has a higher
standard. Be our guest to validate it yourself. And please read our blog post
Tuesday: we will explain how this is done. But if you simply oppose this (and
similar methods from people who really care about privacy), you basically
accept the status-quo of the worst data collectors, because no one else then
will ever emerge (because you do need this kind of data to build a search).

[EDIT]: Just to clarify and not have anyone create the wrong idea - I defend
my earlier point. But your question is loaded. Here's why: We do not collect
browser history, which by definition implies being able to piece visited urls
back to a profile in our servers. That is impossible - to us, each single URL
comes as a detached datapoint - devoid of any information that can be used to
aggregate them back to a user profile.

~~~
garaetjjte
I didn't say it is absolutely inappropriate to collect any user data, it could
be ok after obtaining explicit user permission. Firefox experiment installed
data collection add-on to random users without opt-in, and I still cannot
understand why you thought that was good idea.

>That is impossible - to us, each single URL comes as a detached datapoint

IPs could be used to aggregate those datapoints, and you obviously cannot
avoid receiving these. It is only promises that you or your proxy provider
doesn't store them. (though maybe it is possible to implement P2P mangling
network? encrypt UDP data packet, send to randomly selected peer discovered
from DHT, peer delivers it to your server. Or directly send UDP packet with
spoofed source address, but this is not possible for browser sitting behind
NAT)

~~~
tschakkaMarc
There were extensive tests with opt-in before (Testpilot), but these are super
biased towards techies/enthusiasts (by definition if you read HN or use
Testpilot you’re not representative ...). At some point you need to both test
and get data from more mass market and that would never work with opt-in.
Hence the scrutiny about not even technically be able to do record linkage
etc. And some of the measures you mentioned are/were applied (we post about
this in the next days).

I also stick to my original point: those users who had cliqz had significantly
more privacy than those without.

Having said that: I don’t think, you and me are that far away from each other.
But: If we, who care about privacy constantly criticize or even shout at those
who also care about privacy, those who build better products, but maybe don’t
follow an idealistic “no data at all paradigm”, then we will always end with
the worst data collectors, because non of the alternatives will ever have a
chance (or people get frustrated and decide they can make more money at Google
or ad tech).

By the way, we have a post about data and how we collect it in our blog today:
[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) \-
you might find it interesting).

In any case thanks for challenging us. I don’t believe we’re perfect. But
we’re trying!

~~~
tschakkaMarc
And here are all details how we remove all personal information with a
technology we call Human Web: [https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-
collecting-data-i...](https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting-
data-in-a-socially-responsible-manner.html)

We love to get scrutinized and get feedback on this - we’re very serious about
privacy.

------
abbadadda
> There are only very few truly independent search engines in the world.
> Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are the best known ones. Most other players
> only white label results from those four and are dependent on them and their
> business model.

Does this mean the article is insinuating that DuckDuckGo is dependent on
another search engine? Is this true? Or are DDG results organic?

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
There are prolly only 3 global English language indexes. Google, Bing, Yandex.
DDG uses vague language to make themselves look like they are actual search
engines, which would make you think they actually index the web.

The truth is they rely largely on Bing and Google results and mostly just
rerank them. That's why it's hard to take their PR seriously.

~~~
FabHK
DDG's main selling point is that they respect your privacy. I could not care
less where they get their results from. As such, I continue to take their "PR"
seriously.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
All I'm saying is it's pointless to consider them a realistic competitor of
Google, Bing etc. when they basically punt over the most crucial infra aspect
of being a search engine and when their service is more akin to querying the
Bing API from a headless browser and mildly rearranging the results.

It's also clear that they try to obfuscate this fact by claiming "more than
500 signals / sources", which means they feel that being more upfront about
the truth would work against them.

------
pythux
Absolutely love this quote from the article:

> Paraphrasing Monty Python: “What has Google ever done for us?”. They have
> done an awful lot for society, for the web and probably saved it a few times
> a long time ago. But it is time to also see them as the empire they have
> become. And empires must fall.

I think people generally do not understand well enough the far-fetched
consequences of a monopoly in the search business. We really need more
diversity and competition in this space, not just for quality of results and
convenience of services; but for society as a whole.

The article rightly points out that Google is a new "Cambridge Analytica"
(even on steroids), we should not passively wait for our democracies to break
down because information is controlled by a single private entity. Let's step
out of our comfort zones, try new products, support the ones we like!

~~~
1024core
> We really need more diversity and competition in this space, not just for
> quality of results and convenience of services; but for society as a whole.

There are plenty of alternatives. But people don't use them as much _because
they are worse_.

Consider Bing ( [http://www.bing.com/](http://www.bing.com/) ). It is backed
by a company even bigger than Google. MSFT's market cap is 1.155T; Google's is
899B. MSFT is 30% bigger than Google. Why haven't they put more resources on
their Bing search engine? Spend a few billion dollars, hire away some of the
top search engine experts from Google, and build away!

~~~
dikei
Google receive over 100 Billion USD per year from ads revenue. If spending a
few billion dollars can get you a new Google, then every one would have done
it a long time ago.

------
tziki
How did such blatant advertisement make it to the top of HN? The article
quality here has really been going downhill.

~~~
Ericson2314
Cause people like the headline and talk about that? :D

~~~
monstapatty
Google bad.

------
tanilama
Nah, two or more search engines all being the product of US big techs won't
solve the problem.

EU should have its own search engine. They should subsidize this effort and
have Google pay for it.

~~~
shadowgovt
I've heard that rhetoric somewhere else, and I expect having Google pay for it
will go about as well as having Mexico fund a wall across the border with the
US.

But the European taxpayer should absolutely pay for it.

~~~
soup10
making a search engine is not that hard or expensive, getting users to switch
to it after decades of relying on and trusting google is

~~~
shadowgovt
I would actually argue that making a good search engine with quality and
responsiveness worldwide rivaling Google web search turns out to be an
architecturally hard problem.

A basic web crawler is not. A semantic web crawler and associated search
engine capable of mapping real human input to useful information and dealing
with the heterogeneous structure of data on the web, with low millisecond
latency?

Bing has been working on that problem for years now, how come they haven't
caught up more with Google?

~~~
soup10
It's a much more well understood problem now than it was when google was
founded and the tools and platforms available to assist are light-years beyond
what was available then. Many failed search startups have shown again and
again that marginally better results are not the deciding factor in using a
search engine, it's what's the installed default and how trusted the brand is.

------
mlinksva
> There are only very few truly independent search engines in the world.
> Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are the best known ones. Most other players
> only white label results from those four and are dependent on them and their
> business model. Or they are so localized and small that they do not offer a
> credible alternative. Nevertheless, we at Cliqz are also trying to build
> one: over the last five years, with around 100 people, we have built our own
> search engine beta.cliqz.com from scratch. It’s completely independent, it
> does not use anyone’s technology nor anyone’s business model. It’s built
> end-to-end from collecting, crawling, and analyzing data up to actually
> showing results all this with privacy by design. We’re quite proud of it.
> And each day until this Christmas, we will explain one core piece.

I look forward to reading the rest of the series.

I see no mention of their technology being open source, which makes it a lot
less interesting as an alternative, to me.

Their search UI seems OK, once I turned off all of the noisy widgets,
including the terrible pretty background image. I wish this trend would go
away, but I'm glad they provided an option to turn it off.

------
Hackbraten
Thanks but no thanks.

I don’t trust a browser nor a search engine if an ad imperium paid for it and
gives it away for free.

Does the Cliqz browser still disallow plugins, such as ad blockers?

~~~
pythux
> Does the Cliqz browser still disallow plugins, such as ad blockers?

Hey, I work on Cliqz' adblocker (open-source here: [https://github.com/cliqz-
oss/adblocker](https://github.com/cliqz-oss/adblocker)). Cliqz browser comes
built-in with adblocking, anti-tracking, anti-phishing and private search
built-in so that users are protected _by default_.

You can also install another one if you prefer since all Firefox extension are
also available from Cliqz! But the one built-in is pretty good already[^1] and
we're happy to get more feedback about how we can improve it!

Finally, Cliqz search is also available standalone now so feel free to give it
a try! [https://beta.cliqz.com/](https://beta.cliqz.com/)

[^1]:
[https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html](https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html)

~~~
streetcat1
So how does cliqz makes money?

~~~
tschakkaMarc
Hi, Marc here, I work at Cliqz. We (unfortunately) don’t (at least not a
reasonable amount). We have an advertising model, but it does not rely on any
personal data. We also always think (and tested) a paid product, which would
be the purest and (In my view) best form. Experience unfortunately suggests,
that only very few people would pay. But, I would be happy to be convinced
otherwise. Going back to the article though: This is exactly why we believe
there should be a lot of competition and a variety of different alternatives.
And one or the other might figure out a new approach towards financing search.

~~~
setnone
it doesn’t seem like a crazy idea to pay for a quality privacy focused search
product. I’d better pay with actual money than with personal data.

------
gfawke5
> “What has Google ever done for us?”. They have done an awful lot for
> society, for the web and probably saved it a few times a long time ago. But
> it is time to also see them as the empire they have become. And empires must
> fall.

~~~
shadowgovt
They were definitely involved in several precedent setting legal decisions,
such as the settlement that allowed for scanning of printed works.

------
neltnerb
Wow. You can't even do a search without enabling javascript. Surely no
tracking implications there.

Yeah, I'm going to stick with DDG. Questionable ownership aside they at least
have a functional website without running javascript.

------
baxtr
This reminds me of an old quote by Wayne Gretzky.

 _“Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”_

Google will not be replaced by another search engine. It will be something
else. Something we can’t imagine yet.

------
SllX
I agree with this statement, my default reaction would be to say “build one”
but you have.

I’ll give Cliqz the old college try, but I hope you make it a priority to get
into the next release of MobileSafari as an option if you’re intent with
taking on Google and taking them on seriously.

Here’s a data point of one: my default method of “searching the web” is to
start with Search on iOS, what you get when you pull down on the home screen.
When the results I want aren’t there, and I can usually anticipate when that
will happen, I shift it over to Safari which uses whatever my default is,
DuckDuckGo but mainly because I can change my search engine on the fly with
them.

I also hope you incorporate the same syntax as DuckDuckGo (if you haven’t
already) because to be blunt, every search engine I’ve used in the last few
years is terrible. I can’t use just one, and I end up doing a lot of fancy
site searches. Not even Google today is as good as Google from 2007-2008.

------
ChuckMcM
Because you can inject your ad network ([https://myoffrz.com/en/fuer-
nutzer/](https://myoffrz.com/en/fuer-nutzer/)) more easily if you have your
own search engine, people like Google don't let you use your own ads on their
results generally.

I don't disagree with the premise, after all I was part of a team that tried
to do the same thing (well, without the ad network) and discovered that the
adtech business has become so corrupt (not that it is all corrupt just that
enough of it is) that the only way to cover the costs of running the thousand
or so machines you need to hold a decent index and cache is hard to achieve.

~~~
Karrot_Kream
Curious what you mean by "corrupt" here. I'm genuinely curious as I've never
worked at a company in ad-tech before, so it's always fascinating got me to
hear from insiders.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Ad networks that push adware or malware that facilitate click fraud. I would
guess that anywhere from 2 to 3 billion dollars spent on Internet advertising
each year is ending up in the hands of corrupt ad tech vendors.

------
softwaredoug
What would a different search engine do to differentiate it from Google?

If the answer is privacy, that’s a niche already occupied by DDG.

What other ways could a web search engine differentiate itself to be worth
customers using more than one?

~~~
dehrmann
I used to work for a vertical search engine (comparison shopping). For the
most part, no one in that space was able to build a brand, and they all
depended on either paid or organic traffic from Google to stay open. As the
company I was at and competitors started to merge and die, the largest,
Nextag, went on a PR campaign to tell people Google's a Monopoly[1].

These vertical search engines, at at least in the comparison shopping space,
were never that good to begin with. Shopping (and possibly travel) is just the
easiest vertical to monetize. All the sites were spammy, pages were optimized
for clickouts, and results were optimized for yield, not relevancy, because
everything was an ad. There's a reason none of them were recognizable brands
and they all depended on Google for traffic.

So yes, not just what niche is there, but how can you make it profitable--or
even break-even. Would you donate $10 per year to a non-profit search engine?

[1]: [https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/08/nextag-ceo-google-is-a-
mon...](https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/08/nextag-ceo-google-is-a-monopoly-
google-youve-got-plenty-of-choice/)

------
tclover
I'm already degoogling myself, transferring all my emails to tutanota and
using firefox with duckduckgo now.

~~~
throwingtt
I've been doing this too, but every time I check my open connections in my
router there are a ton of open connections to 1e100.net

------
ummonk
Best of luck to these guys. Is there a way that Cliqz (or any other search
engine) will manage to break through when even Bing is unable to get
significant traction despite Microsoft throwing its weight and its default
Edge installations behind it?

Hopefully there will be even more stringent antitrust enforcement to prevent
Google from buying favorable search placement everywhere, but Google has such
a big edge both in consumer awareness and people adapting their searches to
Google that I'm not sure how it can be dethroned.

------
hnuser77
Cliqz plans to make money by, in the future, "deliver[ing] sponsored offers to
users based on their interests and browsing history...processed locally based
on a remote repository of offers, with no personally identifiable data sent to
remote servers"

This is the reason they're pushing their browser and their extension. Privacy
wise, this method sounds OK if they really don't send the data (or what ads
you see personally) out. I don't mind seeing ads if they are somewhat
relevant, non-obtrusive, and not stalking me across the internet.

My first impression about Cliqz search is that it is somewhat viable, but the
index is pretty shallow. There are actually a few other search engines with
their own index not mentioned by the article (Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu):

* Mojeek. Sometimes really good for obscure sites when you want to "grep the internet" but seems very vulnerable to blogspam and other SEO. Maybe I just haven't figured out how to query this one yet.

* Yippy. Pretty decent index. Cool feature: categorizes search results with a tree on the side, so if you search for "cobbler" you can just remove the pie or shoe results depending on what you're looking for.

* Gigablast / private.sh: private.sh is the new Gigablast proxy run by PIA. Shallow index as well, haven't used it as much.

The search engine market will be up for grabs if Google keeps getting worse at
the same pace.

------
amelius
What happens to our data when this empire falls?

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
Ready for the subprime data to be bundled with AAA rated data causing a data
industry micro-economic collapse? Because I am!

------
dana321
I've built a few different types of search engines over the years.

The first attempt was in 1999, i built a meta search engine using coldfusion..
I didn't have any server to run it on so it was on my dialup running locally.
Worked pretty well, i was a big fan of metacrawler at the time.

The next time was back in around 2003.. I had a server running on my adsl
connection at the time. I wrote a crawler of sorts that indexed word positions
to search by proximity. At the time, Google didn't do this, it was a feature i
was looking for. Eventually, the project died. If i had a 200k startup fund
like google had, it could have probably turned into something.

I did build it on mysql and perl but it needed more servers.. Something i
didn't really understand back then with only about 4 years web experience.

Then, i built another a meta search engine, ran it on a hosted server, gained
some limited traction around 2011. Died as the sources for the api dried up or
became too costly. It did make some money from advertising at the time, which
is a pretty big deal. The coolest thing was the fact that i kept the searches
open, each search had an rss feed that you could use to keep track of certain
keyword sets.

Something i need to say about Google is this: it seems simple, but there is a
lot going on in the background. Its doing a lot of things like checking for
malware, spam, link farms, etc. but also its running the page in a real
browser. Its pulling in data from google analytics and clickthrough/bounce
rates, its always split-testing result sets, showing results based upon
geographic location, language recognition, date recognition, etc. They use
machine learning with real humans training those models, that's not to mention
their internal systems for managing servers.

I think you shouldn't try and copy what they are doing, in the end it doesn't
matter if you do.. Look at bing, its kind of like a joke compared to Google.

Facebook did the right thing, that was to bring the community and data onto
the site itself. Identity is the future. Reddit is pretty good as well, you
can talk about any link on the internet.

User-moderated content is the future, as AI/ML can always fool another AI/ML
but not a human.

You only have to look at this site hacker news to tell that.

------
tehabe
the problem is, I might have no reason to trust Google but I trust software
like Cliqz even less, even though they tell me, that I should trust them
(maybe because of this).

Also Cliqz belongs to Hubert Burda Media, a company which I trust even less.

~~~
aorth
Right. I was really feeling the call to action in the blog post until I tried
to visit beta.cliqz.com and realized it was blocked by the filters I'm using
in uBlock Origin _and_ by the DNS-level adblocking I have on my network. Hmmm.

------
bbulkow
A competitive market with high barrier to entry seems to stabilize at 3
entrants.

Others that might seem to be in market are niche players.

Scale is good for consumers, benefit of scale is a thing, so 'trust busting'
should happen if there are fewer than three.

In the us search market, we have google, ddg, and Bing.

Wanting more choice is very American, but it's hard to take seriously.

~~~
simplicio
I don't think search really has a high barrier to entry. Certainly not
compared to things I usually associate the term with like, say, airplane
manufacture or deep sea oil extraction. Duck Duck Go only had three employees
when they passed a million visitors, so I can't imagine they required huge
amounts of capital.

~~~
FabHK
> I don't think search really has a high barrier to entry.

Others disagree, including Google Chief Economist Hal Varian, who said (in
2008)[1]:

“Scale is pretty critical [because] search technology exhibits increasing
returns to scale.”

Or Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management and
Marketing: “So more users more information, more information more users, more
advertisers more users, more users more advertisers, it’s a beautiful thing."

Or Eric Schmidt: “Scale is key. We just have so much scale in terms of the
data we can bring to bear.” “We are a company that operates at scale . . .
trust me it is a scale company.” “We think search is about comprehensiveness,
freshness, scale and size for what we do. It’s difficult for [Microsoft] to
copy that.”

It seems obvious to me that internet search has both economies of scale and
network effects, both classic barriers to entry.

[1] [http://fairsearch.org/fact-checking-google-scale-is-a-
barrie...](http://fairsearch.org/fact-checking-google-scale-is-a-barrier-to-
entry-in-search/)

------
mbowcutt
So, what's different about cliqz? You promise not to keep logs, skew results,
and sell data?

Also,

> With 93% of the search market, Google’s algorithms decide what becomes
> truth. Can you think of a TV channel with a 93% audience? Would you find it
> acceptable if there were only one TV channel?

Seems to me like Google is more analogous to the TV remote.

~~~
FabHK
As blog post mentions, more than half of Google searches do not result in an
(out-)click, but stay on Google. So, the comparison is not completely
outlandish.

------
rotrux
The world needs more ways to navigate the internet is what it needs. An
intuitive tool that helps me stay on track and/or helps me remember what the
hell I did would be preferable.

The mystery-box-that-reads-my-mind-then-poops-out-links model feels
increasingly clumsy as the years go by.

------
mjlee
Perhaps the .dev tld isn't the best venue for this post.

For those who don't know, .dev is operated by Google.

------
phendrenad2
Search engines are really a relic from back when everyone had their own
webpage. Now everyone posts their content on a handful* of sites - Medium,
Reddit, StackOverflow. I think what we need is an inversion of the search
engine model... instead of a web crawler scouring the web for new pages, these
handful of companies (Medium, Reddit, thousands more) should register with the
search engines and push sitemaps regularly. This is the only way to level the
playing field with Google, since the internet is so vast now that only
Google/Microsoft/Yandex can afford the server/bandwidth fees to crawl it.

*- and by "handful" I mean tens of thousands of sites, which is relatively small.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Search engines are really a relic from back when everyone had their own
> webpage. Now everyone posts their content on a handful of sites

but:

> since the internet is so vast now that only Google/Microsoft/Yandex can
> afford the server/bandwidth fees to crawl it.

Is it a vast space that search engines need to crawl, or are there only a
handful of sites that matter?

~~~
phendrenad2
There are a handful of vast sites that matter.

------
aorth
Hmm, cliqz.com is in the blocklists of several DNS servers I'm using, so are
they the underdogs we need to cheer for against Google et al, or are they some
shady spammers as determined by the community of adblock list maintainers?

~~~
kkm
Hi Aorth,

Disclaimer: I work for Cliqz.

We are aware of this and it's unfortunate, although the lists are not the main
ones from community like Easylist, uBlock Origin etc. Cliqz does need to
collect data to build it's search engine and other features. Even though we do
with by privacy-by-design in mind and without collecting any PII (we will be
sharing more details on the process on data collection in the blogposts
scheduled for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday),still we do end up getting on
such lists.

Of course, you don't need to trust what we say, all the code used for
collecting data is open-source for transparency and auditing. Additionally,
also happy to help setup network debugging incase you want check what exactly
goes out. - [https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-
core](https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-core)

We are also willing to discuss with the maintainers of the list and explaining
what and how data collection is done.

------
cj
Side note:

> In the TV world, this would be the equivalent of 100 different channels, but
> they all show Fox News 24 hours a day and just replace the logo. This
> clearly cannot be good.

Unfortunately that's already happening, just look at Sinclair [0]. They
operate 193 different TV news stations covering 40% of US households and
syndicate very similar content between stations (with the same political
biases, just different logos).

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group)

~~~
toast0
How much of that is syndication (using the same news stories in different
local markets) vs whatever you would call having two channels in the same
market with the same content, but trying to market themselves as different?

------
peterwwillis
Can I _please_ pay someone to let me customize search? I know what results I
_don 't_ want, but there's no way for me to bundle a custom filter to exclude
them.

------
tasubotadas
93% of a search engine market. Ok.

But a search engine is only a smart part of the whole, where and how we get
the information.

If you slice your market in convenient ways, you can make any company a
monopoly.

~~~
shadowgovt
This is extremely true. It's one of the reasons that Google+ came into
existence. And with Google+ being folded up, Google has basically refrained
from competing further in social indexing.

------
buboard
Google's business is advertising, not search. That's where their monopoly lies
and that's where competition is needed. We probably don't need many other
search engines. There is only so many improvements to be done in search. Over
the years, information has been distilled. Google's main use is as a
misspelling corrector, a wikipedia shortcut, a DNS shortcut, a keyword lookup
for the news of the day and a product matcher in a few merchant sites. That's
because most commercial sectors of the net are already in their post-
competitive period, and only the winners in each category are still alive.
Their number is not even enough to fit the first page of results. And the
content that used to go in blogs, it's now behind twitter or facebook,
unreachable to any search engine (except for corporate blogs which are used
for SEO reasons). The recent changes in google search have infantilized it,
burying anything but the most obvious sites.

SEO doesnt even count that much, instead it's curated "reputation" that
matters.We might be at a point where DMOZ is probably viable, because there
aren't now 1000 entries in each category, but 10. In fact a Dmoz would
probably be a mightier competitor to their search.

But the key is , we need competition in advertising. After http referrer was
removed from queries, we left all the information about the user's intent to
google, and, unsurprisingly , they ate it all, and then some more, leaving a
progressively diminishing piece of the advertising/intent processing pie to
the rest of the internet. Is that ethical? Is it OK that a website doesn't
know why the user visited it? After all, the user typed it in the browser's
bar , not on google. Perhaps search queries should be initiated in the
browser, and available to subsequent clicks for processing.

And as for tracking, is it OK that google is the only one who is tracking
users? Shouldnt tracking be a user's decision, provided and mediated by the
browser to any website who asks for it? Like it or not, advertising is not
going away and it's healthier for the net if a large number of publishers
share that (growing) pie rather than if google eats all of it. Tracking doesnt
kill people, but anti-tracking hysteria causes many people to lose their jobs.
Perhaps we should be pragmatic, because being irrationally anti-pragmatic is
only serving Google's long-term interests

~~~
t0astbread
I think I get what you're saying but I'm not sure this is the right approach.
It's accepting diminished rights in exchange for a stable compromise versus
fighting for an absolutist solution at the risk of breaking the whole system.

And personally I'd rather have no internet at all than an internet that's a
weird murky tracking soup where a hundred different parties are creepily
looking over my shoulder, knowing more about me than what I would tell even my
closest friends and family.

------
dehrmann
Feel free to go use Bing. It's been an option for 10 years.

------
uglygoblin
I'm all for more search engines but I'm not a fan of the brand name Cliqz. I
instantly think of the bogus/low quality search results on a parked webpage.

------
unnouinceput
Quote: "There are only very few truly independent search engines in the world.
Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are the best known ones. Most other players
only white label results from those four and are dependent on them and their
business model"

Well, DuckDuckGo is pretty known and independent of Google. Not long time ago
was an article here on HN about how DDG operates and they have their own web
crawler, not relying on Google.

~~~
FabHK
As others have pointed out, DDG appears to use Bing for the majority of their
results, as such is not a "truly independent search engine[]".

------
tasubotadas
>And empires must fall

Why?

~~~
mylons
because they’re often brittle and create closed systems

~~~
shadowgovt
This feels like tautological reasoning.

Brittle empires fall.

The Chinese empire has a history (including mutations to its government)
spanning thousands of years.

~~~
chinesempire
> the last Chinese dynasty — the Qing dynasty — fell in 1911–1912, it marked
> the end of the nation's incredibly long imperial history.

~~~
shadowgovt
It marked the end of that government, but the nation of China is still very
much an empire, by definition of its ambition and cultural reach exceeding its
borders. In the same sense that the US and UK are empires.

~~~
chinesempire
Of course, if you use a custom definition for everything and cherry pick
informations, everything is possible.

But no, it wasn't just the end of the government, it also meant losing almost
30% of its territory.

[https://imgur.com/r/mapporn/Cdi6KOL](https://imgur.com/r/mapporn/Cdi6KOL)

> In the same sense that the US and UK are empires.

UK was an empire, and it's already fallen, it is now on the brink of losing
even the Kingdom and becoming an Island hosting borders and customs.

U.S. is not really an empire, never was. It is more the mandator of many bad
things that happened in the last 70 years, that turned many countries into
U.S. colonies through "exporting democracy" which actually translated too many
times as "planting dictatorships befriended with U.S.A.". But it was good for
U.S. and only U.S.

That's why Cliqz has reasons to exist, U.S. is an unreliable ally, even more
now and Europe needs to

> building the foundation for a sovereign digital future of Europe

> develop digital key technologies as a European alternative to the market
> dominating US platforms.

> If We Don’t Act Now, We Will Become a Digital Colony

~~~
shadowgovt
I'm going by the Wikipedia definition, to wit: "An imperial political
structure can be established and maintained in two ways: (i) as a territorial
empire of direct conquest and control with force or (ii) as a coercive,
hegemonic empire of indirect conquest and control with power." The US and
China are the latter. The UK's power has slipped, but it's still in this
category with extraterritorial colonies. A specific emperor is structurally
optional.

~~~
chinesempire
But the Chinese Empire has already fallen and changed radically, U.S.S.R. is
not the same thing as the Russian Empire, even though they shared most of the
same territory.

The point was that every empire falls sooner or later and that it happened to
China as well.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
I don't think it's possible to convince people that viable alternatives exist.
I've been aware of them for years, and never considered using them once. They
have the stigma of just being not as good. Having more search engines does
nothing if nobody will use them-- Google's hegemony remains if there's n or
100n other search engines, if none of them can provide quality results
reliably.

~~~
ben_jones
Did that stigma not exist for IBM? Microsoft? Oracle? If the crux of Google is
an outdated reputation they'll have to invest more and more to maintain it
until it consumes them and somebody else steps up.

------
CivBase
I love DDG. In my experience, Google still usually does a _better_ job but DDG
is good enough 90% of the time and bang searches make it trivial to handle
that remaining 10%.

I recognize that there is still room to improve DDG's search quality. However,
I wonder if DDG or _any_ competitor can ever get as good as Google without
collecting user data and using that to contextualize searches.

------
RileyJames
I’m not sure I agree that we need a new google, or to break up google.

But we shouldn’t trust google, what trust existed has been repeatedly damaged
by their desire to grow and profit.

In my opinion we need transparency. Why is a result / snippet number 1, 2, 3,
etc for a query?

“The algorithm did it” is not an answer.

Any new search engine should be accountable for the results they provide, and
there should be a mechanism to dispute the results.

------
LuNan
You complain about Google because you haven't use Baidu in China. If you have
used baidu, you will know that Google is much better!

------
agumonkey
Do we need search ? It made sense when the web was wild. But now that it's
very structured ... I'm wondering.

Kinda like road signs vs gps

~~~
radmarshallb
The road system seems pretty structured and we still have road signs.

------
hsaliak
I want alternatives too - they are good for the consumer.

This article was negative to the point of being unreadable. This is not how
you disrupt.

------
entangledqubit
While I am curious about their search tech, it would be nice if they posted a
blog post about their business model so we can understand their incentives up
front.

While I'm wishing, it would be nice to hear about how they anonymize their
logs. Their privacy notice only really mentions scrubbing associated IP
addresses - which may not be sufficient.

------
tracer4201
LOL @ several accounts of people who work at this company selectively
responding positively but ONLY to those who are already on the “Google = bad”
bandwagon.

I’m extremely disappointed in the HN discussion here. The blog post is by
someone wanting to compete with Google. Great. The entirety of the post makes
ZERO compelling arguments about what features, guarantees, or outcomes their
product will provide. In the last couple paragraphs, they mention the word
privacy - okay but how so? What’s the business model? Why should I trust you?

The blog post is nothing more than an attack on Google (and other tech
companies, but that comes later in the article). That’s the only “substance”.

There’s no question that key regulation is missing in the space. But what
exactly is Google even doing that is anti consumer and killing competition?
What anti trust laws have they broken? Should we identify them or maybe
determine what is missing in our legal framework? If the author wants to
compete with Google, perhaps they can share that insight. That be productive.

>Google is Cambridge Analytica on steroids.

That’s a pretty damning statement and unproductive. You want to make an
emotional argument and have keyboard activists work for YOU instead of
sticking to objective facts.

Disappointing this is #1 on the front page. We are turning HN into Reddit.

------
brentis
Google does everything it can to either have the first click or second click
result in a paid event. Videos and related searches are clear examples of the
abuse.

True content is buried or listed in a row or two out of 10 plus results.

Mobile is even more flagrant. Inswitch engines, just to get a less mainstream
and digested view of my queries.

------
utopcell
Google's US market share is 62.4% with Bing at 25.3% and rising [1]. That
doesn't seem like a monopoly to me.

[1]
[https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings#tab_search_share/](https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings#tab_search_share/)

------
michalu
Not a fan of Google at all, but I'll pick them over "privacy focused search
engine" owned by German publisher of Playboy any time of the day.

These guys call for banishment of "search monopoly" yet are in it for the
money and business share. Privacy is just a currently sound competitive angle.

------
kwhitefoot
Cliqz gives me two choices for UI language, neither of which I speak, though I
can read a little. It gives me three choices of search area: USA, Germany,
France.

I would prefer the UI in English and I want hits from wherever they may be
found not restricted to some small area.

Good try, but some way to go.

------
blauditore
Submission title doesn't match article. Was it changed in the article or is
this clickbait?

------
d_burfoot
I think it's strange that companies like France (and Germany, UK, Japan, etc)
don't pass a law saying "Only French companies may service web search requests
originating in France". Web search is basically going to be a monopoly, so
they might as well try to ensure that the vast economic rents created by the
monopoly go to one of their one companies.

There is a very strong national security argument here: you don't want your
citizens' web searches to be controlled by a foreign company, even if you're
nominally allied with the country, because of the immense political power that
control of web search entails.

This kind of policy would unite the populists on both the left and the right.
The left would like the idea of redistributing money away from big American
technobillionaires to local businesses, while the right would appreciate
putting the interests of the nation first.

~~~
tim333
We'd get annoyed by being unable to use Google or Bing as there are not many
such local services. The governments might be able to extract some more of the
rents by taxing Google et al more.

------
ReptileMan
I don't want google to fall. I want it to become better. The google results
have moved from good (2004) to great(2006-2009) to good (2010-2011) and are on
a slope to completely useless from there on .. right now are in shitty.

------
marban
If you're looking for an alternative, dedicated tool to search US news give
[https://yetigogo.com](https://yetigogo.com) a whirl. I'm indexing the top
~150 sites in real-time.

------
dewey
Was looking at that Cliqz company out of curiosity and while browsing their
job page ([https://cliqz.com/en/about/careers/campaign-
manager](https://cliqz.com/en/about/careers/campaign-manager)) saw this:

"MyOffrz is opening a brand new marketing discipline: Browser Based
Performance Marketing. This innovative technology makes it possible to show
users discounts, special offers and valuable information with true added value
within the browser. As a 100% subsidiary of Cliqz GmbH..."

"These include independent search engine, browser and privacy technologies as
well as new techniques for responsible advertising and statistical data
collection for the benefit of all users."

Seems a bit odd for a company that brands itself as a privacy search engine.

~~~
detaro
Their entire premise is that they can do an ad-financed product with less
invasive tracking. Obviously, that involves advertising people.

~~~
rbinv
Tracking and targeting are just two possible reasons why people dislike ads.
Invasiveness is another one - think popups, popunders, layers, interstitials,
pre-/postrolls etc.

So even if they don't do "tracking", injecting ads surely isn't something the
average user "signed up for" when downloading the browser.

~~~
detaro
Sure, I totally agree. Doesn't change that that's the business Cliqz is trying
to build. They're promising to be better on the privacy front than other ad-
based products (we'll see how they actually do, I'm somewhat skeptical), not
to be "distraction-free" or "non-targeted". That might not be the product you,
I or many other people want.

------
21xhipster
Proposed design is flawed. The same as Google. Check our proposal:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21678527](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21678527)

------
zulgan
It is already too late for Google to fall. Even if it falls something worse
will take its place.

What are our options? Government? How will it be even remotely close? Data
will be needed, How will the government get data? They will probably make it
mandatory in schools of course. Why not? its for the good of the children.

Interesting times indeed.

“The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of
choice, chooses to use traditional , personal, moral, or empirical means,
thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no
efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to
accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself by the victor, but
only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no
freedom of choice.”

― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

------
golemotron
You can't compete with search directly. It's entrenched. The best you can do
is make it irrelevant by occluding it with something that provides better
value.. voice-based assistants, for instance.

------
Uptrenda
Wow, they managed to build a Google competitor that doesn't suck. This is
actually pretty crazy. I never thought there would be new innovation in the
search space. I'll be using this from now on.

------
ravenstine
There already are other search engines, but most people view Google as god and
infallible in it's results. Even tin foil hat wearing people I know who hate
Google the company refuse to not use Google.

------
ro-_-b
Tried it out in German. Works definitely better for German language queries
than Duckduckgo. Kudos to whomever is behind this & best of luck. The world
needs alternatives to Google.

------
Animats
Perhaps what's needed is an antitrust breakup which forces Google to divest
its ad business. They can then sell wholesale search to others, who can
compete by monetizing it.

------
adamnemecek
If someone wants to build a better search engine, start with a better code
search and then expand to other areas. Github search is so bad.

~~~
shadowgovt
Improved online code search and indexing feels like a very untapped market.

------
29athrowaway
What do you think would happen if Google disappears? My bet is that Baidu
would take over and then you would have even more problems.

------
anon1m0us
How do I make this my default search engine as for when I type something into
my address bar like I can with Google, Bing, or DDG?

------
h0h0h0h0111
One piece of feedback - currently your site governs language by region, rather
than by browser language.

------
streetcat1
So let's say that google fall and you become the new king. Will you allow
another competitor in?

~~~
TKWasRight
Yes.

~~~
streetcat1
why?

Don't you have fiduciary duty for the owners of the company to maximize
profits? Why do you want competition?

~~~
shishy
Lol, he's just saying that now. Everyone says that kind of stuff when they're
not at the top. Then they get there and fully realize their constraints, and
it dies down.

~~~
streetcat1
Yes I know. I just want to see how far he will go with these arguments.

------
jstein93
The unbundling of google is happening. There needs to be better document
search.

------
gopher2
I'd like a better (paid) way to search for medical advice/information

------
nchase
Is there an english-language version? The website is in German for me

~~~
__ka
There is - click the settings icon on the top-right corner. Then click on
Sucheinstellungen, and under Sprache choose English.

~~~
FabHK
Might make sense to make that more easily discoverable for international
users, but I guess you're working on it.

~~~
__ka
Yep, we'll try to push an update in the coming days for a more meaningful
interface and result language detection.

------
jjuhl
Somewhat suspicious that www.cliqz.com is hosted by Google..

------
mThumbnail
Search engines are not just about quality of results. A reason to use Google
is that it's what everyone else uses, so by using it you also get for free a
picture of what kind of results everyone else is getting

------
dageshi
The world doesn't want more search engines though. Like the world doesn't want
another streaming service to pay for, it just wants everything in one place
which costs $15 a month or preferably free.

------
q4Zar
use brave and switch you search engine to duckduckgo

------
cocktailpeanuts
is it just me or the site can't be reached?

------
mac_was
Why is duckduckgo not mentioned at all?

------
clorine64
hvae been using the CLITZ browser for some time and really enjoy it.

~~~
mikl
> CLITZ browser

Rather unfortunate typo, that.

------
sigzero
The world had more search engines. A lot more. Google beat them all and they
all folded.

------
LyalinDotCom
Just Bing it :-)

------
keepper
It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric.

I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that
well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity.

This “romantization” of this ideal state, devoid of historical context or
acknowledgement of the world we live in is extremwly counter productive.

Should google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple do better? Absofuckinglutely!!!

Regulate them, hold them to a higher standard!

But Will breaking them up do anything except destroy them and just empower the
next competitor ( who will have to learn the same lessons?

Even worse, likely in a country that won’t match your same values of “freedom”

Are imbalances in power great? Nope

Are monopolies awesome? Most never

Are billionaires awesome? Nope

But this is the stage we are at due to an interconnect global economy. We
built this.

Knee jerk solutions don’t and have never fixed anything

~~~
mikl
> I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that
> well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity.

They were well behaved when they had competition to worry about. Once they
effectively achieved a monopoly, ethics slowly got relegated to the back seat.
They started leveraging the search monopoly to take over other industries, to
undermine the open web, to engage in political censorship (hello Project
Dragonfly) and much more.

Everything you say here is an excellent argument why search should not be a
monopoly. We need competition to keep the search engines honest. Regulation
won’t help, since orgs like the FCC are vulnerable to regulatory capture, and
there’s no other way to "hold them to a higher standard" than taking your
business elsewhere. As long as you continue using their products and thus
earning them money, they don’t have any reason to care what you think about
their business practises.

~~~
candiodari
Isn't "project dragonfly" the Google search engine version for China? Google
was trying to comply with the law. It's a law you might not agree with, but
come on. The reason all these governments want Google split up is more
censorship, not less. From torrents to negative reporting on EU commissars.
From everyone's interpretation of hate speech to pages pointing out that
sometimes social services are the abusers in children's lives, not so much
their savior. Scihub, Schwartz, Snowden, Yellow vest demonstrations, Hong Kong
student injuries and disappearances, Twitter making some tax agency officer's
abuse of power a big deal, ...

That's why they want Google and Facebook broken. And of course, they're
unwilling to spend any money, change any law anywhere, accommodate anyone, or
put in any kind of effort whatsoever.

Fundamentally they want the internet to disappear. They want the control of
information out of the hands of these idiotic American nerds that refuse to
control information !

~~~
lonelappde
How would breaking up a company help censorship? Surely it's easier to censor
one entity than many.

~~~
CDSlice
One the other hand, Google is so big that it could just ignore demands from
smaller countries, especially when they are a small drop on the bucket in
terms of revenue. Multiple small, regional companies can't afford to go
against the government in their area and aren't present in other areas.

Right now the only country that could actually do anything about Google is the
US, but they won't because we benefit from having the number one internet
search company be American.

Also, the rank and file employees in Google are largely liberal and tend to
make a big fuss over things like censorship. If Google is broken up a company
that is more friendly to state interference could emerge and take it's place.

------
Darth_Hobo
I think people should be responsible for their actions. If they only use
google without even trying anything else then they are themselves to blame for
whatever bias/lies google have fed them. And asking me to pay yet another tax
for regulations so that dumb people are protected from the consequences of
their actions is... it's like they are trying to build a kindergarten for
adults. And I am not a fan of socialism.

~~~
MamaJumba
Even if the consequences of the dumb people's actions indirectly (or directly)
affect your life?

~~~
Darth_Hobo
Yes. If I put myself in the position where I am heavily dependent on what they
do then I have only myself to blame. And if it is a minor dependency then I
probably won't even care. And if you are talking about them doing violence
then bullets are cheap.

------
edisonjoao
lot of facts

------
Kaiyou
As far as I remember there's Google, there's Bing, something that only works
with Chinese, something that only works with Russian, search engines that
barely work at all and a bunch of meta search engines, that use Google or Bing
or both at the same time under the hood, like DDG, Searx, Startpage, etc.

So yeah, I'm down for more search engines. If there wasn't only one dominant
one, SEO wouldn't be such a problem, either, I imagine.

------
slowenough
This is cool. But some criticism. UI seems a bit janky. Results are good but
visually presented in a way it's hard to tell each result card from the next.
Cliqz is a bad name, even tho you may want the world to be a cyberpunk
dystopia where renegade hackers control the outposts of civilization, Google
has not fallen yet, pick a name the 99% can relate to. And get Machiavellian
... if you're really gonna beat Google, you're not gonna do it with hippy
tactics, no love flowers light or manifestos. You have to get evil and more
evil than Google. You have to out evil the big evil.

Realistically if I were trying to beat Google I wouldn't be building a search
engine. What can you offer that they can't? And if you even begin to compete
with them there, what steps can they take that you can't recover from?

Instead, I would focus on beating them first, building search later (if search
is what you actually care about). What's Google's weakness? Figure out "the
cord that makes them run" (to paraphrase Meredith Vickers in Prometheus) and
relentlessly attack that (legally, of course, this is business not cartel turf
war). I have no idea what that might be, but Rome fell, IBM fell (well,
stumbled, I guess?), so Google must have its Visigoths or Bill Gateses or
whatever.

You built something cool, that replicates the functionality (80%). Cool. Good
for you. You proved you can do it. Now decide if you really are serious about
"beating Google", and figure out an effective way to do that. Search engine is
not the way.

Anyway, Google built the (past of) search. If you really wanna do search,
build the (future of) search. I dunno, like AR/VR search? Search for FBs AR
platform? I have no idea but text search on WebPages is the past. Google
already won. Get over it and move on. Build the future, or go build a better
steam engine, you know, for like fun and stuff. Because it's cool, but it
won't ever beat Google. Sorryz Cliqz

~~~
solso
[disclaimer I work at Cliqz]

We are all ears on ideas on how to beat Google :-)

But on a serious note; i do not think that the aim is to beat Google because
of Google but because on the monopoly they have on the access to the
information. And that's why we are building a potential alternative there.

Attacking from a different domain, might beat Google on that area, or let's go
wild here, perhaps even on revenue, but would not fix the problem we wanted to
fix to the begin with.

"Replicating" 99% of the functionality with a quality to be good enough is a
very valid option IMHO. Otherwise if one decides to leave Google, where do
they go? If they do not want to advertise on Google, where do they go? There
are too few alternatives, there are many names, but most of them are
aggregators (full or partial). That said, if besides Bing, there would be 4 or
5 like them (or better), then yes, I concede that Cliqz as is, would make no
sense.

~~~
slowenough
well I like your crazy idea. why not offer me a job?

------
helpPeople
Google is getting bad, but I want a decent competitor to Windows/Android.

Apple is not competition. They serve a lax customer base.

------
DeonPenny
No it does not. Google is one of the few things that need only need one of.

------
ghjyui
You guys are polishing the steam engine, while we need some real progress.
Typing a search query isn't much better than typing a SQL query. This should
be the last resort thing.

We need a service that would organize the information for us. Instead of us
telling the service what we want to see, the service should tell us what's
worth attention. Some people care about NFL, so they would be given the most
valuable news about NFL. Others care about superconductors, so the service
presents them a daily summary of most important advances there.

