It’s the one time where I can honestly say: The discussion we’re having within Cliqz about our brand name are even more heated and controversial than here on Hacker News (and Reddit for that matter) ... but then there is this saying: “Every brand name is shit until you surpass one billion users - than it becomes brilliant”. More seriously: we do think about it a lot - happy to get ideas.

Thanks for responding. Honestly, knowing that there are people behind it who read HN and are humans lends it credibility. Glad to hear there may be a viable competitor to google, and I'll check it out. Mostly because the big g has started demanding re captchas on normal searches from my VPN IP, which is clean and I have owned for years. Some of the marketing I've seen mentioned, "AI-powered anti-tracking technology"; could you please elaborate on what that means?

This is our anti-tracking tech we include in the Cliqz browser and also in the Ghostery Extension. We have another post lined up in the series on this (in a couple of weeks), but it's also been described in our blog posts[1] and our 2016 paper[2].

[1]: https://whotracks.me/blog/how_cliqz_antitracking_protects_us...

[2]: https://static.cliqz.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Cliqz-St...

How are there even two sides to the discussion internally? I'd sooner cut off my left nut with a spoon than trust any company named 'Cliqz.'

You might as well name yourself "Nigerian Princes Inc."

Well there are people who believe this and others who believe that ... as I said - very strong opinions (like yours) on both sides of the aisle even internally. Interesting proposal with the Nigerian Inc. - if we ever launch an email service or - better - a Spam filter, I’ll make sure to name the company Nigerian Princes Inc.!

So what you are saying is that you trust Google more than a German/European company, where the laws are way more strict.

Enjoy 1 nut.

( Extreme comment fyi )

I don't have to chose between the two. I trust neither.

Put your contact info here or in your profile and I'll send a really good idea...

@MarcAlHames on Twitter

In 2003, a friend told me she ignored Firefox because "it sounds like it was named by an eight-year-old boy". My response: who cares? Why does that matter in the slightest? Is "Internet Explorer" really better? Would you prefer a search engine called "Web Searcher Site"?

Like DuckDuckGo is any better? I understand where you are coming from using the "z" for lulz/kool factor. At least they left a vowel in the name.

Yeah, Cliqz seems well within the range of trendy website names, unlike DuckDuckGo.

Yeah, the name "Google" definitely sounds more professional....not.

It does though. There’s a ton of services using a deliberate misspelling in their name and all of them are meh at best in my experience.

You do realize Google is a misspelling of googol right?

Googol isn't, and never has, been a common word.

this is 100% because you've become inured to how strange it is. Google's name was a joke when it started.

That may be true, but Google started when I didn’t have similar preconceptions based on name yet. The trend of calling something Trackr, Suprnova etc. didn’t exist.

Now any service with a name like that seems shit compared to more readable/writeable names: Stackoverflow, Quora, datadog.

Case in point is srht.co, which rebranded to Sourcehut for similar reasons.

Replacing the 'ol' suffix in 'googol' brings 'google' much closer to common English phonetics. These could all be pronounced the same but would have been a harder sell:

* gugal -- like frugal

* gugle -- like bugle

* ghougle -- like ghoul

* googull -- like gull

So should they rebrand as Clickle?

That would actually fall within the "goofy name but phonetically consistent" category that would be excusable once big, so maybe.

google is such a stupid name to be honest, and what the hell with amazon, is it some Brazilian website?

Googol can help: "Bezos instead named the business after the river reportedly for two reasons. One, to suggest scale (Amazon.com launched with the tagline "Earth's biggest book store") and two, back then website listings were often alphabetical."

https://mashable.com/2011/07/22/facts-amazon-com/