Mozilla made a strategic investment in Cliqz, maker of an iOS and Android browser with a built-in search engine, “to enable innovation of privacy-focused search experiences”.

Mark Mayo, SVP of Mozilla Firefox, said Cliqz’s products “align with the Mozilla mission. We are proud to help advance the privacy-focused innovation from Cliqz through this strategic investment in their company”.

Cliqz is based in Munich and is majority-owned by international media and technology company Hubert Burda Media.

The Cliqz for Firefox Add-on is already available as a free download. It adds to Firefox “an innovative quick search engine as well as privacy and safety enhancements such as anti-tracking”, said Mozilla.

Cliqz quick search is available in Cliqz’s browsers for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. The desktop and iOS versions are built on Mozilla Firefox open source technology and offer built-in privacy and safety features.

Cliqz quick search is optimised for the German language and shows website suggestions, news and information to enable users to search quickly.

It claimed that while conventional search engines primarily work with data related to the content, structuring, and linking of websites, instead it works with statistical data on actual search queries and website visits.

It has developed a technology capable of collecting this information and then building a web index out of it, something it calls the ‘Human Web’.

What’s more, Cliqz’s “privacy-by-design” architecture technology guarantees that no personal data or personally identifiable information is transmitted or saved on its servers.

Jean-Paul Schmetz, founder and managing director at Cliqz, said Mozilla is the ideal company to work with because both parties believe in an open internet where people have control over their data.

“Data and search are our core competencies and it makes us proud to contribute our search and privacy technologies to the Mozilla ecosystem,” he said.