cliqz

I joined Cliqz in 2016 as part of the Desktop Browser team, working closely with engineers from Firefox to design Instant Search and the browser's core privacy features. Over the next three years my role grew from UI design into full design leadership – building and hiring a UI/UX design team, extending the browser, and partnering with Marketing to shape how Cliqz spoke to the world.

In January 2020, we shipped the project I'm proudest of from this era: a fully independent European search engine, built on its own index rather than licensed from Google or Bing – one of only a handful of search engines in the world built this way. It reached several hundred thousand daily users on privacy alone, with no compromise on the index.

Cliqz shut down in April 2020, a casualty of COVID-era funding conditions rather than product or design failure – the technology worked, and worked well. In its final year, I led design on the rebrand of Ghostery, the company's privacy-tool sister product, which carried the team's work forward after Cliqz itself closed.

The search technology we built didn't disappear with the company – it was carried forward by former teammates under the name Tailcat, and in 2021 Brave acquired it as the foundation of Brave Search, which today serves as Brave's built-in, privacy-first alternative to Google.