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Cliqz is shutting down

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Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#3

Post by itcrowd »

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

This must be a joke, right? Who the heck installs a browser (extension) that advertises on a porn website? Changing the Cliqz name would have been WAY better. Cliqz sounds super shady and I would never have guessed it was a search engine.

To me this product sounds like one of those toolbars in web browsers years ago.

Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#4

Post by dontbenebby »

ddevault wrote: post #2

Good riddance. "Privacy-oriented" is the most egregious tagline I've ever seen from a company like Cliqz. Their real motus operandi was spying on users for targeted ads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox

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

It amazes me so many companies (not just privacy oriented) don't think the ground truth of having a useful product which treats users with respect is necessary in order to be successful.

Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#5

Post by skyfaller »

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

- https://github.com/cliqz/cliqz-concept-browser

- https://github.com/cliqz/daisy

I love Beaker Browser and its vision for a P2P web, but it hasn't had a major release in a while (despite seemingly having active development) and it appears it will be desktop-only for the foreseeable future. I don't think Dat will have much uptake until there is a solid browser on both desktop and mobile.

(There was also the Bunsen browser trying to support Dat on Android, but it seems to be abandonware and I was never able to get it working anyway: https://github.com/bunsenbrowser/bunsen/ )

Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#6

Post by dessant »

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

> A cynic might say that Cliqz failed because of our strong passion for technology and a missing drive from business development.

A cynic might also say that you were dishonest and masqueraded as something different than what your business model represented, so people had no compelling reason to switch over from Google, which does a much better job at offering quality products and deceiving its users.

I hope Brave Browser is next. Brave is the kind of company that exploits people's desire for privacy to become a rent seeker for creators and publishers, sprinkled with some crypto tokens as bait.

Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#7

Post by rjkennedy98 »

itcrowd wrote: post #3

> Some of the back-burner [marketing] ideas were: Changing the Cliqz name, turning the browser colors to pick for Valentine’s day, advertising on porn websites (okay, that one made it). This must be a joke, right? Who the heck installs a browser (extension) that advertises on a porn website? Changing the Cliqz name would have been WAY better. Cliqz sounds super shady and I would never have guessed it was a search eng…

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

Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#8

Post by dorkwood »

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

A common argument I've seen used to defend bad names is "Google and Twitter have silly names, and they succeeded!" Well, I was there when those companies first came on the scene, and I didn't find their names embarrassing, so there's a difference between silly and embarrassing, I believe.

Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#9

Post by robotnikman »

dorkwood wrote: post #8

Up until a certain threshold, I think company names are unimportant and one can succeed despite having a silly name. But once a company steps over that threshold with a name like "Cliqz", it becomes difficult to overcome the embarrassment you're generating whenever someone has to read or say your company name out loud. A common argument I've seen used to defend bad names is "Google and Twitter have silly names, and t…

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