The world needs more search engines - <AUTHOR> https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-01/the-world-needs-cliqz-the-world-needs-more-search-engines.html <comment><USER6> 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.

<comment><USER7> _> 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.

<comment><USER8> 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)

<comment><USER9> 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.

<comment><USER8> 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?

<comment><USER10> 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.

<comment><USER8> 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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 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)

<comment><USER12> 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)

<comment><USER13> 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.

<comment><USER14> Can you ID someone positively by their typing patterns and an IP?

<comment><USER15> 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)

<comment><USER16> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 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.

<comment><USER18> 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.

<comment><USER19> 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.

<comment><USER20> 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 - <USER2> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 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.

<comment><USER8> It seems more like an advertisement/justification/explanation for their search engine?

<comment><USER21> 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.

<comment><USER22> That is factually incorrect: [https://beta.cliqz.com](https://beta.cliqz.com)

<comment><USER21> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 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

<comment><USER24> 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.

<comment><USER23> 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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> 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.

<comment><USER26> 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 [email@example.com].

<comment><USER14> 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.

<comment><USER27> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> 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?

<comment><USER29> 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...

<comment><USER28> > Do you want latency to be larger??

Instant results are good for sure, however very often few more seconds - <USER3> 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!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> 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.

<comment><USER31> 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.

<comment><USER32> 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.

<comment><USER33> I use StartPage.com which is based on Google but strips the private data.

<comment><USER34> "Startpage is now owned by an advertising company" : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> 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.

<comment><USER36> 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.

<comment> 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.

<comment><USER37> They should break Alphabet up into 26 different companies, each getting a different letter.

<comment><USER38> This is the best logical conclusion so far

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> 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 - <USER4> of competing by making a better product, we want our competitors to be taken out by government.

<comment><USER40> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> 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.

<comment><USER42> 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 ...

<comment><USER43> 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" ...

<comment><USER42> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 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)

</comment><comment><USER44> 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.

<comment><USER45> 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.

<comment><USER44> 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?

<comment><USER46> > chrome allows you to change your search engine to anything

Which they mention a line below your quote.

<comment><USER44> I am not disputing that, I am just asking how does any other browser make it even easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> 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/)

</comment><comment><USER48> 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.

<comment><USER49> 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.

<comment><USER50> Tweets do show up in search though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> 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..

<comment><USER42> 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 - <USER5> 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).

<comment><USER51> 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)

<comment><USER42> 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.

<comment><USER51> 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)

<comment><USER42> 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!

<comment><USER42> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> > 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?

<comment><USER53> 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.

<comment><USER54> 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.

<comment><USER53> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 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!

<comment><USER55> > 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!

<comment><USER56> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> How did such blatant advertisement make it to the top of HN? The article quality here has really been going downhill.

<comment><USER58> Cause people like the headline and talk about that? :D

<comment><USER59> Google bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> 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.

<comment><USER61> 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.

<comment><USER62> 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

<comment><USER61> 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?

<comment><USER62> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> > 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.

</comment><comment><USER64> 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?

<comment><USER22> > 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)

<comment><USER65> So how does cliqz makes money?

<comment><USER42> 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.

<comment><USER66> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> > "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.

<comment><USER61> They were definitely involved in several precedent setting legal decisions, such as the settlement that allowed for scanning of printed works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> 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.

</comment><comment><USER69> 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.

</comment><comment><USER70> 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.

</comment><comment><USER71> 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.

<comment><USER72> 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.

<comment><USER71> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> 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?

<comment><USER74> 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/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> I'm already degoogling myself, transferring all my emails to tutanota and using firefox with duckduckgo now.

<comment><USER76> 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

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> 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.

</comment><comment><USER78> 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.

</comment><comment><USER79> What happens to our data when this empire falls?

<comment><USER80> Ready for the subprime data to be bundled with AAA rated data causing a data industry micro-economic collapse? Because I am!

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> 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.

</comment><comment><USER82> 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.

<comment><USER83> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> 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.

<comment><USER85> 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.

<comment><USER54> > 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/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> 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.

<comment><USER54> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> 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.

</comment><comment><USER88> Perhaps the .dev tld isn't the best venue for this post.

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

</comment><comment><USER89> 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.

<comment><USER90> > 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?

<comment><USER89> There are a handful of vast sites that matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> 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?

<comment><AUTHOR> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> 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)

<comment><USER92> 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?

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> 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.

</comment><comment><USER94> 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.

<comment><USER61> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> 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

<comment><USER95> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Feel free to go use Bing. It's been an option for 10 years.

</comment><comment><USER96> 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.

</comment><comment><USER97> 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.

<comment><USER54> 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[]".

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> >And empires must fall

Why?

<comment><USER98> because they're often brittle and create closed systems

<comment><USER61> This feels like tautological reasoning.

Brittle empires fall.

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

<comment><USER99> > the last Chinese dynasty — the Qing dynasty — fell in 1911–1912, it marked > the end of the nation's incredibly long imperial history.

<comment><USER61> 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.

<comment><USER99> 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

<comment><USER61> 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.

<comment><USER99> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> 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.

<comment><USER101> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> 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.

</comment><comment><USER103> 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.

</comment><comment><USER104> 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!

</comment><comment><USER105> 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

<comment><USER106> The road system seems pretty structured and we still have road signs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> 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.

</comment><comment><USER108> 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.

</comment><comment><USER109> 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.

</comment><comment><USER110> 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.

</comment><comment><USER111> 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/)

</comment><comment><USER112> 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.

</comment><comment><USER27> 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.

</comment><comment><USER113> Submission title doesn't match article. Was it changed in the article or is this clickbait?

</comment><comment><USER114> 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.

<comment><USER115> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> 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.

</comment><comment><USER117> 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.

</comment><comment><USER118> 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.

<comment><USER119> Their entire premise is that they can do an ad-financed product with less invasive tracking. Obviously, that involves advertising people.

<comment><USER120> 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.

<comment><USER119> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER121> 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)

</comment><comment><USER122> 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

</comment><comment><USER123> 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.

</comment><comment><USER124> 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.

</comment><comment><USER125> 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.

</comment><comment> 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.

</comment><comment><USER126> 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.

</comment><comment><USER127> 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.

<comment><USER61> Improved online code search and indexing feels like a very untapped market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER128> 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.

</comment><comment><USER129> 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?

</comment><comment><USER130> One piece of feedback - currently your site governs language by region, rather than by browser language.

</comment><comment><USER65> So let's say that google fall and you become the new king. Will you allow another competitor in?

<comment><USER131> Yes.

<comment><USER65> why?

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

<comment><USER132> 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.

<comment><USER65> Yes I know. I just want to see how far he will go with these arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER133> The unbundling of google is happening. There needs to be better document search.

</comment><comment><USER134> I'd like a better (paid) way to search for medical advice/information

</comment><comment><USER135> Is there an english-language version? The website is in German for me

<comment><USER26> There is - click the settings icon on the top-right corner. Then click on Sucheinstellungen, and under Sprache choose English.

<comment><USER54> Might make sense to make that more easily discoverable for international users, but I guess you're working on it.

<comment><USER26> Yep, we'll try to push an update in the coming days for a more meaningful interface and result language detection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER136> Somewhat suspicious that www.cliqz.com is hosted by Google..

</comment><comment><USER137> 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

</comment><comment><USER138> 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.

</comment><comment><USER139> use brave and switch you search engine to duckduckgo

</comment><comment><USER140> is it just me or the site can't be reached?

</comment><comment><USER141> Why is duckduckgo not mentioned at all?

</comment><comment><USER142> hvae been using the CLITZ browser for some time and really enjoy it.

<comment><USER143> > CLITZ browser

Rather unfortunate typo, that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER144> The world had more search engines. A lot more. Google beat them all and they all folded.

</comment><comment><USER145> Just Bing it :-)

</comment><comment><USER146> 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

<comment><USER143> > 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.

<comment><USER147> 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 !

<comment><USER148> How would breaking up a company help censorship? Surely it's easier to censor one entity than many.

<comment><USER149> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER150> 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.

<comment><USER151> Even if the consequences of the dumb people's actions indirectly (or directly) affect your life?

<comment><USER150> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER152> lot of facts

</comment><comment><USER153> 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.

</comment><comment><USER154> 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

<comment><USER155> [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.

<comment><USER154> well I like your crazy idea. why not offer me a job?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Google is getting bad, but I want a decent competitor to Windows/Android.

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

</comment><comment><USER156> No it does not. Google is one of the few things that need only need one of.

</comment><comment><USER157> 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.</comment>


GuideHire: Uber of Guides - <AUTHOR> http://www.outsideonline.com/1987046/company-wants-be-uber-guides

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems like the Outdoor Industry is consistently behind in adopting technology. In the past year I've seen a number of outdoor-based startups spring up (HipCamp, Yonder, GearCommons, GuideHire). Is the outdoor industry due to be overhauled by technology? Anyone can think industries with similar characteristics? Guides and outdoorsmen/women have tended to be 'techy' in the past but I feel as if this is changing. Thoughts?</comment>