
Alibaba-backed search startup Quixey is shutting down - apsec112
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/03/09/quixey-alibaba-funding-mountain-view-shutting-down.html
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throwaway_bn5j
Quixey was a big sponsor to the college hackathon scene. They spent money on
sponsorships all over the place. The engineers were for the most part good
people, but the CEO Tomer was entitled and verbally abusive to people who got
on his bad side. I think Tomer had a Steve Jobs complex. He would give talks
about how great his startup skills were, and give keynote talks about how
Quixey was changing the world. But it was apparent that Quixey had little
traction and was going nowhere.

As time went on, Quixey kept sponsoring hackathons but Tomer would blow up at
the students organizing them for little to no reason. He's a 30-year-old man,
and he would be screaming at the top of his lungs at high school and college
kids because he thought they had slighted the sponsorship. He threatened to
not pay sponsorships after the fact, said he would tell his founder friends to
"blacklist" hackathons, and even said he wanted to sue students for breach of
contract.

That's most of my experience with Quixey the company. I never did use their
product, but I'm not really sad to see them shut down.

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stale2002
Ha! I remember that. It was all over secret.ly .

They freaked out because they weren't able to get the biggest room at one of
the events.

Good riddance, I say.

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clay_to_n
Quixey was the lead sponsor at a large college hackathon (I think LA Hacks) I
was at a couple years ago. They were trying to build a search engine based on
deep-linking into other mobile apps. A very good idea ("why doesn't google
also search your phone's apps?"), but very hard to beat Google at it. The
value needs to be very strong to get people to use it as a default search
engine.

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angry-hacker
Google does index the content of apps that is not available on the web if you
want and let them do it. But you see them in serps only the if you have the
apps in question installed.

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sriku
Quixey's tech could do it without the "if you want and let them do it" part ..
by which I don't mean permissions, but that no special arrangements need to be
made by the apps.

It is analogous to how google crawls websites with Javascript .. which are
essentially applications that need to be "run" before you can get to their
content.

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jakozaur
I once won $100 from their competition, but never figured out how they are
going to be profitable. Independent mobile app search makes little sense when
there are two App Stores (Android and App Store) with builtin search.

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kornish
My understanding of "app search" is that they weren't search for the apps
themselves – they were making the _contents_ of the apps visible to other apps
installed on a device. Quixey helped pioneer deep linking, iirc.

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ma2rten
Isn't deep linking by definition a feature that had to be implemented by iOS
and Android?

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kornish
Definitely – but I would consider that to be separate from simply finding apps
in the app store.

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mathattack
They've been on a downward slide for a while. I think many are thinking, "Were
they still alive?" From what I've heard, they have good engineers so their
tech folks should land well.

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BrailleHunting
Not a surprise. Many other sites tried (and failed) to do app
discovery/recommendation without having a defensible competitive advantage (ie
selling analytics and ads may not be enough). Other apps in the overlapping
third-party app store / update notifier spaces have met a similar fate (ie
Bodega) while some survive (ie Ninite, Secunia PSI).

alternativeto is currently a leader (ad-supported) but doesn't have a "moat"
around it other than popularity.

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hatred
I would remember their Quixey Challenges. They had some nice problems as part
of them and if you were able to spot the bug correctly, you got $100 + a
hoodie.

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frozenport
The conspiracy theory is that they are an attempt by the Chinese goverment to
search user apps.

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jbyers
Several previous posts here in the last two weeks. No comments.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13880373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13880373)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13873035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13873035)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13830314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13830314)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13827524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13827524)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13827185](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13827185)

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sebleon
> No comments

Is this the startup equivalent of having a funeral where no one shows up?

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amygdyl
Oh, I deserve punishment for this, but Startups are so 2017...

Really, seriously, though the startup drum has been beat very hard indeed -
not merely by the magnifier anything which reaches mainstream press from
anywhere thought to be technology. But I forget when I last read about a
startup that either was developing technology, or was a startup in the sense I
originally understood. I think I lost the appreciation I did have, when to
pivot became a seemingly overnight, instantaneous, blanket verb to admit no
wrong and plow on burning cash regardless of a total failure to relate real
world to prospectus.

What I have enjoyed seeing from afar, is much more valuable, however, than the
spectacular sums sunk in startup mirage wells: the idea that it is a good
thing to swing for the fence, in particular when young and resilient to life's
knocks (albeit tempered massively by the new new new medieval economy of
absent social and financial safety) and the widespread promulgation of
baseline knowledge how to handle just starting a company, and demystifying the
corporate world, I believe will pay dividends in eventually spurring - allow
me a sincere hope - a renaissance of small business. Because there sure is not
much, sometimes I look, thriving in the penumbra of ZIRP funded corporate
giganticism. I was just reading Berkshire Hathaway's 1990 report, yesterday.
BRK was still counting in millions and tens of millions, and hundred of
millions in equity... This epochal inflation has happened while so many grew
up, it may be that economic historians, at least of the contrarian kind,
ponder whether the startup boom was not a fear induced, hysterical, reaction
to the absolute necessity to hit ball after ball out the park, in the early
21st century, to dare dream of a home and family.

edit, somehow auto correct dumped "romanticism" in the least fitting place...

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beedogs
Starting a search engine in 2017 is kinda like starting a stagecoach company
in 1917.

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eli
How so?

