Thank you for the additional detail and this certainly appears to be a challenging problem.
It is still a little fuzzy to me. What is a "synthetic query"? Is this basically generating queries that would match the content (i.e. essentially reversing the process)?
Novelty, freshness are interesting but can lead back to the noise problem mentioned in the blog. If many pages are created that may match the query (e.g. "best new movies") many young pages will match this. Popularity would be useful but difficult to establish and then there's the clickbait and other gaming problems.
Why does Cliqz use an analytics domain with a typo in it to get around user tracker-blockers? That's incredibly scummy, given how much Cliqz has been shouting about privacy.
Anolysis stands for Ano[nymized] [Ana]lysis. It's a new approach to do telemetry without sending unique identifiers (like most analytics / telemetry) systems do - but focus on goal attainment at a group level. This makes work harder of course, but it's a price we've been willing to pay. It is a pity you would take a domain name as evidence of malice. We should have a paper coming up at some point on the approach.
Self-claimed anonymous analytics have repeatedly failed in the past: you've been using this for at least two years, why didn't Cliqz release a paper before then on it? Or even explain what it is? Or a mention on your site of it? I don't want to dislike Cliqz, what it says it's doing is cool. However, given the financial incentives involved, the verify step of "trust but verify" is more essential than ever.
Seems like an excellent opportunity to apply Hanlon's Razor.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
They've been doing it for two years at minimum:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15423936
Two years and three domains with the typo? It's malice.
This malice metric is confusing. How malacious is Google then? They misspelled "googol" for over two decades, but there's only one domain. Do we count the 1e100.net as a misspelling?
How does using an odd spelling thwart user-tracker blockers?
Re:A New Search Engine
by chance_state on Friday December 06, 2019 @06:20PM
(#21727056)
Many ad blockers have baseline filters that block subdomains, URLs, etc. with common tracking terms in them (ex. "telemetry" or "tracking").
Your point is spot on. Old pages tend to have more association to seen queries, which does not play in favor for new pages.
That said, however, there are a couple of things to consider: 1) seen queries is not the only way to create queries, we are pretty good creating synthetic queries based on the content, descriptions, etc. This queries are more noisy that the seen queries of course, but good enough. And 2)novelty, freshness and popularity are very important features on the ranking. Feel free to try out any new topic you might think of on https://beta.cliqz.com, you will see that is not only "stale" content.