Cliqz

» see cliqz.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

cliqz was a german product at the language layer. ui in german, blog in german, press coverage in german. you could install it in english but the gravity of the project was always munich. i was in turkey on chrome and edge, the brand never crossed my desk in the 2015 to 2020 window when it was live. when i went looking for it for this obit, even the press archive read mostly in horizont and heise headlines.

cliqz was founded in 2015 as a subsidiary of hubert burda media, the munich publishing house that owns focus magazine and bunte. the pitch was a privacy-first browser with a built-in search engine that did not use google. it was a firefox fork with crowdsourced anti-tracking and an integrated search bar that returned results from its own index.

on april 29 2020 cliqz gmbh announced the shutdown. updates ended on may 1. the official statement said google had 95 percent of european search and political will for an independent european alternative did not exist. covid was cited as the proximate accelerant on the funding side. roughly 45 employees were affected. ghostery, the privacy extension cliqz had acquired in 2017, was kept alive as a separate brand.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

two things at once: a browser and a search engine. the browser was firefox-based with extra privacy plumbing baked in. the search was tailcat, an independent index that did not depend on google or bing. that was the unusual part. most privacy browsers proxy a google search with the tracking stripped. cliqz tried to actually run its own crawler.

mozilla took a minority stake in cliqz in 2016 and ran a brief experiment piping cliqz suggestions into firefox in germany. that ended after privacy complaints about how the suggestion telemetry worked. ghostery, the long-running anti-tracking extension, was acquired by cliqz in february 2017 and folded into the same privacy-tech stable.

~ the long tail ~

tailcat, the search engine, did not die when cliqz did. brave acquired it in march 2021 and used it as the foundation for brave search. so the european crawler-and-index project burda paid for ended up powering an american privacy browser instead. ghostery survived too, spun out to a new owner and still shipping as a tracker blocker in 2026.

cliqz the brand was the only part that died. the team scattered, some to brave, some to ghostery, some to other german privacy startups. burda walked away from consumer software. the lesson burda took public was that you cannot build a google alternative on private capital alone in europe, you need policy backing. five years later the eu started talking seriously about that. cliqz was already gone.

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