Search risk or how Google almost killed ProtonMail

In the past two months, many of you have been interested in the mysterious tweets that we wrote for Google in August . For ProtonMail, transparency is a key value, and we try to be as open as possible with our users. Since many people continue to be interested in the question, we decided to explain what exactly happened in order to avoid confusion and speculation in the future. In this article we describe the development of events to clarify what happened.

For about a year, Google hid ProtonMail from search results for “secure email”, “encrypted email”, etc. It was extremely suspicious, because ProtonMail is the global leader in providing encrypted email services.

In May 2014, when ProtonMail launched a beta, the number of our users quickly grew, because people from all over the world have gathered and supported our initiative to protect privacy in the digital age. Our crowdfunding campaign broke records and raised more than half a million dollars, which gave us the resources to make ProtonMail competitive against the biggest players in the email business.

By the summer of 2015, ProtonMail already had half a million users.and we had good positions on Google - on the first or second page of the issue on most requests like “encrypted email” and “secure email”. However, by October 2015, the situation had changed radically and ProtonMail mysteriously disappeared from the results of issuing on the main requests.

From the beginning of the summer to the fall of 2015, ProtonMail has undergone many changes. We released ProtonMail 2.0, completely opened source codes (only the front-end is open - approx. Translator), launched beta versions of mobile applications, updated our site and changed the TLD from .chto .com. We also doubled the number of users, which was about a million by the fall. All these changes should have helped ProtonMail in search positions, since we have become increasingly relevant to many people.

In November 2015, we knew about the problem and consulted with many SEO experts, but none of them could explain the reason, especially considering that ProtonMail never used black SEO methods, and we did not notice that anyone used black seo against us. It is strange that this anomaly was only in Google, in other search engines everything was fine. The table below shows the search positions for ProtonMail for “secure email” and “encrypted email” requests, as of the beginning of August 2016 in the main search engines. Everywhere the first or second page, except Google, in which we are not ranked at all.



During the spring of 2016, we tried hard to connect with Google. We created two tickets to explain the situation. We even tried to contact the director of EMEA Strategic Relationships, but did not receive a response or any improvement in the situation. Around the same time, we heard about the antitrust campaign launched by the European Commission against Google, accusing Google of using a search monopoly to reduce the search positions of Google’s competitors . It was disturbing news, because Email that puts privacy first is Gmail's main competitor for those who care about the privacy of their data.

In August, left without much choice, we used Twitter to make our case public. This time we finally got an answer, thanks to the hundreds of ProtonMail users who drew attention to the problem and made it impossible to ignore it. A few days later, Google informed us that they had “fixed something” without any details. The results appeared immediately.



In this graph, the X axis is the time, the Y axis is the search positions (less is better). Segments of the graph without points mean that during this period we did not rank at all in Google. After Google had fixed something, ProtonMail positions were immediately restored and now we rank # 1 and # 3 by “secure email” and “encrypted email”, respectively. Without any additional explanations from Google, we will never know why ProtonMail was not extradited. In any case, we are grateful that Google has finally taken action to solve our problem, we just want it to happen faster.

Search Risk Hazard

This case tells us about a previously unnoticed danger, which is called "search risk" (Search Risk). The crux of the problem is that any competing service, such as ProtonMail, can be easily suppressed by search engines or by the government that controls these search engines. This can happen everywhere, regardless of state borders. For example, even considering that Google is an American company, it controls more than 90% of European search traffic. In our case, Google was the reason that ProtonMail’s global growth was 25% less for almost 10 months.

This means that ProtonMail revenues from users also decreased by 25%, creating additional financial difficulties for us. We have reached the point that in order to cover monthly expenses, we had to use the resources of an emergency reserve fund. Profit losses and financial losses amounted to several hundred thousand Swiss francs (1 CHF = 1.01 USD = 63.28 RUB) and will never be reimbursed.

The only reason we survived and we are writing this story is that ProtonMail became so widely known, word of mouth, and our community was too big to ignore. Many other companies are less lucky. This case clearly shows that search risk is a serious problem, and we agree with the European Commission that, due to Google’s dominant position in the search business, its openness and control are critical.