For what it's worth, their engineering blog about how to build a large-scale search engine more or less from scratch was really interesting: https://0x65.dev/
Weren’t there a bunch of posts on HN by them?
Cliqz is shutting down
11–20 of 59 posts
Re: Cliqz is shutting down
#12> 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…
I am also not quite ready to concede that a Chrome/Blink base is the only way a browser can be successful. I'm sure the day is coming, and I'm not sure that we can ever go back when it does.
Re: Cliqz is shutting down
#13Cliqz was a hypocritical product right from the start, and it never attracted a large userbase. The only reason it survived that long because the company behind Cliqz didn't care about throwing lots of money into the idea of creating a competition to google.
Second, the product doesn't provide any practical benefit to google users, so there is no point to switch.
Cliqz didn't realize that you can't sell privacy as a primary product. Privacy is always a secondary attribute to a real product.
That's why DuckDuckGo is succesful. It profits from the increasing privacy-awareness, but people use it because it both works and respects privacy.
Brave is far from perfect, and to a certain extent it is indeed hypocritical. Brave sells us the idea of decentralization, even though in practice there is no decentralization at all.
Other than that, you can't compare Cliqz with Brave, and here's the reason why Brave will not fail:
- First and firemost, they have a consistent monthly growth in their userbase for years - In contrast to Cliqz who pushes their own products via Ghostery, Brave acts as a neutral middleman, thus creating a direct competition with Google et al., who are also middlemen. In other words, Brave offers every customer the same opportunity to serve ads - An innovative and unique product: The monthly growth proves this point, as innovation leads to demand. - user first ideology: Even though Brave wants to be a middleman for a privacy-preserving money-flow between creators and users, they allow the user to chose whether to activate it or not. By default, Brave is just a browser that blocks annoying and privacy-infringing stuff. With Cliqz it is basically impossible to get the Cliqz out of the browser, with Brave I can change my browser in a way as to never see anything related to ads, crypto tokens, etc. and Brave actively respects that decision.
As long as Brave respects users like me who deactivate everything in the browser related to ads and crypto schemes, they will continue to have a loyal userbase behind them.
Re: Cliqz is shutting down
#14Wow. From that team photo alone it looks like they had ~100 employees.
I've never even heard of this company, and I'm still sorta tuned into the browser business, and based in Europe.
Where did they get the money to hire ~100 people?
Edit: Ah. They got their money from a german media group struggling to stay relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Burda_Media
Re: Cliqz is shutting down
#15Cliqz was a hypocritical product right from the start, and it never attracted a large userbase. The only reason it survived that long because the company behind Cliqz didn't care about throwing lots of money into the idea of creating a competition to google. Second, the product doesn't provide any practical benefit to google users, so there is no point to switch. Cliqz didn't realize that you can't sell privacy as a…
You can't deactivate the occasional ad in new (empty) Brave tab, can you?
Re: Cliqz is shutting down
#16> 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…
And yet I just use Brave because it's a nice Chromium fork with actually useful built in anti-tracking tools and a focus on privacy that has been proven in detail by other people by simply sniffing network calls.
I don't use BAT (at least right now). I use Patreon which is a "rent seeker", or in other words someone providing a service for a fee for handling transactions without me having to physically go to the other person and give him money, and I find that very useful. So I don't see what the issue is with it even if I don't care about it.
Re: Cliqz is shutting down
#17Wow. From that team photo alone it looks like they had ~100 employees. I've never even heard of this company, and I'm still sorta tuned into the browser business, and based in Europe. Where did they get the money to hire ~100 people? Edit: Ah. They got their money from a german media group struggling to stay relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Burda_Media
Some of their posts were quite popular on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=0x65.dev
Re: Cliqz is shutting down
#18I'm a little sad about it. I've been using Cliqz from the browser search bar for a few months only because it's not Google. I'm probably switching to DDG now.
The search engine kind of works, but years behind Google. The most annoying missing feature is no "exact terms" search, which is a problem when googling error messages.
All considered I pressed the Google button at the bottom maybe half of the times, and I bet very few people would stick to such a search engine.
> Cliqz failed because of our strong passion for technology and a missing drive from business development
I don't know about Cliqz but this is generally true. We developers do a great job building (oh well) but if somebody doesn't do an even greater job at selling the outcome won't be good. The importance of selling vs building is 80-20 IMHO.
Re: Cliqz is shutting down
#19[deleted]
Re: Cliqz is shutting down
#20I'm a little sad about it. I've been using Cliqz from the browser search bar for a few months only because it's not Google. I'm probably switching to DDG now. The search engine kind of works, but years behind Google. The most annoying missing feature is no "exact terms" search, which is a problem when googling error messages. All considered I pressed the Google button at the bottom maybe half of the times, and I bet…
Just wrote this today, specifically regarding your exact search issue. Seems like a timely share with the Cliqz news.
https://www.runnaroo.com/blog/the-search-engine-hacker-news-...