16 ms·

Show HN: Runnaroo – A new search engine

380 points by chris_f 6y ago

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chris_f 6y ago
Hi HN! I'm the creator of Runnaroo. The title is a fun little rib at Neeva, which has been getting a lot of press recently. I initially launched Runnaroo in a Show HN [0] at the end of February, and wanted to do a followup because the site has grown considerably in features and users over the last fews of months. The core idea of Runnaroo revolves around a search engine of federated data sources to provide the most relevant and highest quality results. We are now over 50 Deep Search sources, and adding more weekly. Some examples of queries that I believe provide better results than peer search engines. react.js: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=react.js https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=react.js creatine effects research: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=creatine+effects+research https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=creatine+effects+resear... metallica tabs: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=Metallica+tabs https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=Metallica+tabs parkinson podcast: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=parkinson+podcast https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=parkinson+podcast bootstrap collapse link: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=bootstrap+collapse+link https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=bootstrap+collapse+link [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22422604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22422604
- chris_f 6y ago
  Also, just as a point of reference, here are the same queries on DuckDuckGo. react.js: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=react.js&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=react.js&ia=web creatine effects research: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=creatine+effects+research&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=creatine+effects+research&ia=web metallica tabs: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=metallica+tabs&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=metallica+tabs&ia=web parkinson podcast: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=parkinson+podcast&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=parkinson+podcast&ia=web bootstrap collapse link: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bootstrap+collapse+link&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bootstrap+collapse+link&ia=web
  - tgb 6y ago
    You've got a typo in your second link! Confused me for a second.
    - chris_f 6y ago
      Updated. Thanks.
- aboringusername 6y ago
  I think you've done something very interesting that makes me rethink the idea of a "search engine". For all the data Google has, and all the AI and technology, their search isn't very "smart" at allowing you to contextualize or filter the searches very well. For example, a button to remove social, to offer meta-data (such as whether a question is answered/unanswered) or offer features that might help me find what I am looking for. Google has a huge index, but naturally, there's going to be 'noise', and maybe I want to see what's on page 50, or want to try and 'filter' some of the more popular sites. Their UI for enabling this is non-existent. Another example: Google BigQuery has the entire Reddit archive, they could surface meta-data such as the number of comments or whether entire comment chains are deleted (although, doing that against Reddit's API at scale would be a very difficult challenge and perhaps not welcomed by reddit). But to me, as a user of search, that might influence what content I end up viewing, because perhaps a thread with 0 comments isn't so useful to me, or a thread full of [deleted] comments is worthless and should be de-indexed (and deciding what is valuable is a very hard question to answer).
  - anigbrowl 6y ago
    I think all search engines fail in providing a list of ordered results. What you actually want is a look at the graph that they were plucked from. As things stand, it's not just a case of being unable to see the forest for the trees, but being unable to see the forest because you are forced to infer its structure from a small basket of leaves. The only company I've seen attempt anything like this is the (criminally under-recognized) carrotsearch.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      Do you mean https://search.carrot2.org/ https://search.carrot2.org/?
      - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
        If he does, I can see why it's not popular. I tried a single query and was told my search limits been exceeded.
- marban 6y ago
  If you're interested in doing something with News hit me up. https://yetigogo.com https://yetigogo.com thomas.me
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  How does Runnaroo compare to search engines like duckduckgo, searx.me and in the sense of openness and accessible source codes? Is it open source? Does it have an openly accessible plugin/search feature ecosystem? How do you think people would trust you when it comes to the privacy aspects?
  - chris_f 6y ago
    All good questions. Trust will only come with time and a track record of making user centric decisions. Runnaroo currently does not save any information on user search queries, and a core element of the tool is the privacy aspect. If you need an open source hackable search engine, Searx is a better choice, and the most privacy centric option because you can run your own instance.
- RestlessMind 6y ago
  Interesting site, and we definitely need more options for search. What is your business model?
  - Splendor 6y ago
    I'm not OP, but they answered this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23773713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23773713
- SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
  This is intriguing. Have you considered allowing external developers to provide Deep Search integrations? I'm imagining a platform where developers can submit Deep Search modules that would run in a sandbox with access to your index, metadata stores and knowledge graph. These modules would return a confidence score and results for a given query, with no ability to snoop on users by exfiltrating data. They could answer a single query or handle an entire domain. The best ones would rise in prominence according to their performance. One big hurdle is that developers would have to be properly incentivized to return accurate results, but if that can be achieved, you could end up with something that is way better than Google.
- dang 6y ago
  (If anyone is missing a rib, the submitted title was "Show HN: Runnaroo – A new search engine that didn't raise 37.5M to launch")
  - ebg13 6y ago
    > If anyone is missing a rib What do you mean by that?
    - dang 6y ago
      The GP mentioned that the title originally included a "rib". We took that part out of the title. Some people might read the GP comment and wonder what it was talking about. When we make a change to a title or URL and notice a comment whose meaning is affected by the change, I try to reply with the missing information.
- thewarrior 6y ago
  It seems that its using Google search results as raw input and re ranking them. How do you get access to google search results ?
  - thruflo22 6y ago
    Yup, Google T&Cs explicitly forbid. So it’s either breaking them or got a deal with Google?
    - rvnx 6y ago
      Knowing how Google works there is no deal
  - puranjay 6y ago
    For complex queries, my results are distinctly different than Google
  - zelly 6y ago
    Probably scraping with a sea of proxy IPs or a rented botnet One could test this hypothesis by doing the same thing to it--spamming search queries from numerous IPs--to see if Runnaroo's IPs stop working (get 429'd or captchawalled). I don't really have time to whiteknight for G, but OP should be prepared for them to take notice. (Maybe create a global rate limit.) I'm interested in how the ranking algorithm works because it seems really good. Edit: Runaroo is now down. Looks like he was ahead of me on the global rate limit suggestion.
- temp231239 6y ago
  One think that I would like to see solved by indie search engines is the ability to break the search bubble and see whats usually hidden on 10th page of google search results. This is a serious problem in all big search engines. One interesting way to solve search bubble problem is to have an option to filter out results from high traffic websites and blogs who invest heavily in CEO and pollute search results. Having this filter will surely open a completely different world of information that's very hard to search.
  - skratlo 6y ago
    This is so on point, thanks for that. Pollution is indeed the right word for it.
  - Flashtoo 6y ago
    > have an option to filter out results from high traffic websites That's what Million Short does https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/
    - fireattack 6y ago
      The first thing I searched, it shows Oops.. sorry about that!Engineers have been notified and are looking into the issue. If you see a captcha, be sure to fill it out and submit to continue your search Edit: it looks like it doesn't support anything that is not in Latin letters at all.
    - ornornor 6y ago
      Thanks, worked well for me and I found information I couldn’t find on ddg.
    - Darkphibre 6y ago
      Good grief, this is astonishing. The other day I tried tracking down the names for various avatar species in VRChat. Surely someone had a list curated... but bing, google, and ddg all let me down with ancient wikis or completely unrelated sites, no matter my quoting or alternate search terms (animals, avatars, creatures, etc.). Very first hit on millionshort: https://www.vrcarena.com/ https://www.vrcarena.com/ Edit: Though, I'm still trying to track down a more comprehensive list. That one's missing Nanachis, which are rather common these days.
- nbardy 6y ago
  Well done. The rect page is better for sure. Runnaroo is lacking in design Visually everything is very similar and hard to quickly parse. I want to immediately be able to scan results to tell what url's they are from. Two issues, the url is light grey and blends in with the text body. There is no favicon.
- still_grokking 6y ago
  It passed my "search engine quick test" :-) I've tried "metacircularevaluator" as a search term. The results are relevant and good. Will have an eye on this one!
  - inetsee 6y ago
    My search engine quick test is "lojban" and Runnaroo's results were among the best I've seen. I've been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine of choice 95%+ of the time, only falling back to Google if DDG's results seem weak. I've added Runnaroo to my bookmarks toolbar. I'm going to try it out as my second choice search engine, demoting Google to third place.
- markandrewj 6y ago
  I just wanted to say that I was impressed by privacy statement being short and clear. I clicked on the privacy link expecting multiple pages of overly complicated writing.
- tmikaeld 6y ago
  Are date filters planned?
  - chris_f 6y ago
    Absolutely.
- mesaframe 6y ago
  You are saying Neeva is getting a lot of press. But, This is the first time I read about that.
- zerr 6y ago
  What about the tech behind?
- puranjay 6y ago
  Man this is really, really good stuff! In a few test searches, you beat Google. I tried this search on Runnaroo and Google: "black muscular guy in 99" (I meant to search for Terry Crews from Brooklyn 99). Google just showed me some random Pinterest page as the 1st result, followed by results from YouTube, Facebook, and Google Books. But on Runnaroo, Terry Crews was the result in the right sidebar. It was also the 3rd result. This is the first time a search engine has excited me in years. Very impressed.
- ori_b 6y ago
  Do you index the web yourself?
- noncoml 6y ago
  May I ask how do you plan to monetize this? I like your privacy policy, but unless there is a good financial plan behind it, I have trouble seeing how it can be sustained
  - rebel1 6y ago
    Great question. I answered in a another post: I wish something like the Web Monetization API was a viable path to monetization, but I don't think it is in the current state. I believe the only current path to monetization that preserves user privacy is context based display ads that work like billboards in the real world. I am working on that now, but the idea is a flat fee to display the ad for N days regardless of views or clicks. It is certainly challenging, but DDG and Startpage both exist and seem to be profitable. The key is to monetize and 1.) ensure user privacy, 2.) ensure the monetization method doesn't create perverse incentives in contention of providing better search results for users.
    - noncoml 6y ago
      thank you!
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      How aggressively are you willing to moderate and kill bad ads? The biggest issue I see with Google/Bing/AOL/Yahoo Search (and even DDG!) is malicious advertising. It's led me to the general view that any search ads are hostile by default, and I've often found outright dysfunction when it comes to shutting down bad actors. The other issue I'd be curious about is your position on trademark squatting. i.e., where if I'm Best Buy, my competitors can buy ads over the search term "best buy", so if I want my own site to be the first "result" for my own business name, I have to buy ads.
      - elcomet 6y ago
        Maybe the answer is that you buy display time, but with no keywords. Like in the real world, everyone will see the ad. Or you can just buy ads for a given "theme" and the search engine will try to interpret queries and assign theme the most close theme, displaying relevant ads.
- randomstring 6y ago
  Uhg. Site is down at the moment. Even these suggested searches are returning an error page. Top Tip to future search engine builders: cache, cache, cache. Especially the canned searches on you press releases and HackerNews posts.
  - rebel1 6y ago
    Fair enough. It will be down for a little while. Good lesson for the future.
- Exuma 6y ago
  What is a federated data source?
- nycdatasci 6y ago
  This maintenance seems poorly timed: "Thank you for checking out Runnaroo! Unfortunetely, we are temporarily taking the site down while we perform some updates. Apologies to our existing users. We are working to get back up to be better than before."
  - FPGAhacker 6y ago
    Typo too.
  - chris_f 6y ago
    Ha, you're telling me! Yeah, taking the site down was directly related to the Hacker News post. It will be temporary though.
- riquito 6y ago
  Any plans to allow users to blacklist domains? Even post search would be fabulous
- blux 6y ago
  Hi Chris! Looks great! Are you considering a domain blacklist feature? For example, when searching for C++ documentation, I rather never be served results from cplusplus.com.
speedgoose 6y ago
How to you get query results from Google without getting blocked?
- wolco 6y ago
  Pay...
  - dumbfounder 6y ago
    Is that true? I didn’t think they had an api for search anymore. Maybe they use these guys? https://serpapi.com/ https://serpapi.com/
    - mgreg 6y ago
      I believe Startpage.com still has a deal with Google to repackage their search results. The search results are identical so not sure what terms Google puts on them.
  - speedgoose 6y ago
    How? With Bing you can pay but they require you to not do anything with the results, such as caching, filtering, sorting, removing the tracking links... With Google it just seems not available.
    - Kiro 6y ago
      > removing the tracking links What does this mean? I don't see any Bing tracking links on DDG.
      - speedgoose 6y ago
        The Bing search API doesn't return the real links but tracking links. I guess DuckDuckGo or Qwant negotiated to get the real links.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dna_polymerase 6y ago
Tried a few queries, and the direct redirect when I type in facebook is more than questionable. If Google did this I couldn't properly research news or facts about facebook. It is a really questionable practice. That said, I would rather use this page than DDG, as long as I don't get lies about privacy stuffed in my face.
- chris_f 6y ago
  I call that a Quick Direct. It's not for everyone, and you can disable that feature under the advanced search options. Surprisingly (to me at least) that is the feature that resonates the most with non-technical users. A lot of people use Google just as a navigational tool to go to a website they know about. This saves them a step for some highly popular websites, but your point is still well taken.
  - aboringusername 6y ago
    It would be okay if I typed in facebook.com or faecbook.com, sure. But not allowing me to see the index for "facebook" is really not what I expect from a search engine. What if I want to type "facebook" and see general information, or news? I can't as your search redirects me away. Maybe offer a card: "Do you want to visit Facebook?" would suit the best of both worlds. Or, if you must, a 10-second auto redirect. Anything but going straight to FB.
    - CobsterLock 6y ago
      from my anecdotal experience: having anything other than a hard redirect entirely misses the point of this feature. A click or waiting 10 seconds pretty much nullifies all the benefit. I think an opt-out is the best way to go. Any technical enough user that is bothered by it should be competent enough to disable it or be aware what happens when they are trying to get general information. Observing my dad using his iPad, he regularly types sites without the TLD with his only intention being to get over to facebook.com
    - hundchenkatze 6y ago
drcongo 6y ago
A couple of bits of feedback: 1. The searches I tried did return decent / good results, so well done! 2. The image search results page is not very useful / usable - there's no keyboard navigation or filtering (add "vector" as a filter and I'll be back regularly). 3. Dark mode would be nice. 4. What's your business model?
- chris_f 6y ago
  Appreciate the feedback, and I agree. The image (and news for that matter) search tabs are now kind of just a box check, but they are both on the roadmap to built out to be made much more usable. Adding a dark mode will be pretty simple and I can add it to the list. I wish something like the Web Monetization API [0] was a viable path to monetization, but I don't think it is in the current state. I believe the only current path to monetization that preserves user privacy is context based display ads that work like billboards in the real world. I am working on that now, but the idea is a flat fee to display the ad for N days regardless of views or clicks. [0] https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/
  - drkstr 6y ago
    FYI I would happily pay a modest yearly subscription fee to any service that would save as much time as yours potentially does. Keep up the great work!
    - pedrocx486 6y ago
      +1, I loved how well it worked, I'd be willing to pay too.
  - drcongo 6y ago
    Thanks for the response. I'm definitely going to keep an eye on this for the future. One other small thing to mention, default searches in Safari are chosen from a fixed list, DDG worked around this limitation before making it on to the list by releasing a Safari extension that switched out the default search which could be an option for you until the day you make that list.
darsoli 6y ago
Does this use one of the bigger search engines (Bing, Google) as an API, or is it fully custom rolled?
- chris_f 6y ago
  For the organic web results, it is using Google right now, Any Deep Search results provide the specific data source at the top of the result box.
  - mgreg 6y ago
    While I didn't use them and have no comments on their search quality I did admire Cliqz for their ambition. They were building and running their own index until earlier this year. (https://cliqz.com/announcement.html https://cliqz.com/announcement.html) They open sources some components e.g. https://github.com/cliqz-oss/keyvi https://github.com/cliqz-oss/keyvi. I think any long-term search engine competitor will eventually need their own index though DDG is doing well financially so far.
deleted 6y ago
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throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
I tried searching for cmov gcc (url: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=cmov+gcc https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=cmov+gcc). Very impressive! Actually gives me stuff that's, I dunno, relevant. Actually included both words without me quoting them - I wish DDG did that - you normally need to search for "gcc" "cmov".
jedberg 6y ago
A small feedback: You have a circle on the page that says "A better search engine. Learn why →". But only the tiny text is clickable. It would be great if that whole circle was clickable. Bigger link targets are always better.
colesantiago 6y ago
Is Runnaroo open source? I cannot find the source code?
rohan1024 6y ago
This is great! Just for test I searched for "python read command output without check_output" and Runaroo has more relevant search than Google. Runaroo: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=python+read+command+output+without+check_output https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=python+read+command+out... Google: https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=python+read+command+output+without+check_output&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=pyt...
nickx720 6y ago
I love it. Please consider dark mode :)
munificent 6y ago
I was wondering about the business model for this: > We may also add an affiliate code to some results returned that result in small commissions being paid back to Runnaroo if you visit or make purchases at those sites. I don't have an opinion on this one way or another, but it's an interesting approach.
- chris_f 6y ago
  I took that from one of the ways that DDG monetizes results. It's more aspirational right now than actually in practice. I was briefly in the Amazon affiliate program, but they told me search engines aren't allowed as part of their TOS.
  - mgreg 6y ago
    DDG has a deal with Amazon. All product searches show Amazon up above with payment for that. Not sure if it's exclusive or if DDG has deals with other eCommerce players.
mttjj 6y ago
Looks nice, thanks for sharing. I do find the three pieces of configuration to be inconsistent however. The first two have you flip a switch _on_ to turn something _off_. "Turn Off Quick Directs" and "Turn Off Deep Searching" would probably be better as "Quick Directs" and "Deep Searching" where the toggle defaults to the "on" state. They look very similar to iOS controls so I think the users' understanding of on/off state is already there. As for the third option "Strict Search On", "On" seems redundant at best and misleading at worst. Misleading because I'm not sure if the text is going to change when I toggle the switch. Meaning I don't know if this is a static label telling me what the setting is or a dynamic label telling me what the current state is. In summary, I would make the button text more consistent and change their default states: [x] Quick Directs [x] Deep Searching [] Strict Search As a side note, the controls are different on the main page vs the result pages. On the homepage they are switches while on the results pages they are check boxes.
- chris_f 6y ago
  Thank you! You wouldn't believe how long I messed with that when I first set it up. I just couldn't get it to click. On the differences between the pages, currently in the middle of a redesign. Everything will be consistent very soon.
old-gregg 6y ago
I do not know how you're doing it, but I just ran quite a few searches for obscure film photography and chemistry topics and the results were much better than DDG and less commercialized than Google. Very impressive!
carlsborg 6y ago
Hey this is good. Great work!
qwerty456127 6y ago
IT-related search results seem super relevant. I wish other subjects would work equally well. E.g. supplement/condition-related search could also result in links to sites like selfhacked.com in the top (the actual articles there include references to scientific papers to back every particular statement) which Google actively hides from its results despite it's among my first go-tos.
exabrial 6y ago
All I want from a search engine to the ability to search for an exact phrase once in awhile...
yoavm 6y ago
Was very skeptical - every time I try some new search engine it just gives really bad results. Tried some quite esoteric things and was very surprised - also for non-English content. Trying this as my default search now! Congrats. Edit: suggestions could be useful. For now, I'm editing the Firefox plugin to get suggestions from Google.
matchbok 6y ago
I mean, this just uses the Google API. So, nothing new here. Your entire business relies on them.
- Kiro 6y ago
  All alternative search engines rely on either Google or Bing.
DonnyV 6y ago
Would love to know how they have access to Google index? Which is listed as a source.
davidajackson 6y ago
That's cool that if you search youtube it takes you right to youtube. Google doesn't do that.
deleted 6y ago
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RobLach 6y ago
I wish the about page had some information about the people who built this because I feel trust is increasingly important in my rubric for choosing what services I use.
gavribirnbaum 6y ago
why is it that all search engines still look like Google in the 90's. Can't the UI become fresher? also I think SEO really ruined the search experience. do you have plans to use other ranking factors? Maybe social upvoting or so to improve ranking of actual good content as opposed to crappy listicles which is 50% of search results right now?
nerflad 6y ago
I appreciate how in image searches, you appear to be filtering dupes.
simonw 6y ago
It's a bit weird that searching for "twitter" redirects me straight to https://twitter.com/ https://twitter.com/ - I understand the intent there but I'd rather get search results - I know how to navigate using my browser URL bar.
- simonw 6y ago
  Looks like that's covered here already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23771401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23771401
simpsond 6y ago
Nice work! One bug/feature I noticed: Once focused on the image tab, if I revise my search, the image tab loses focus and the primary search results tab gains focus. It wasn’t the expected behavior for me.
totaldude87 6y ago
i like the way it orders the search results and not listing meaningless more pages of results. One thing i found while searching images is that, i cant start a new image search , because it brings me back to the "all" tab. ex: search harry potter go to images , now i wanted to search for hermione images alone, but it takes me all back to full web results.
agotterer 6y ago
I searched for "common" - https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=common https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=common and noticed the first result had a json payload as the description, which isn't visible on the site. Seems like a possible bug.
fireattack 6y ago
Why does it use "https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=" https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=" style URL for general information from Wikipedia? Doesn't seem very convenient.
didip 6y ago
hohoho, wow. Tried quite a few searches and the results are very relevant. This is great. If this is just piggybacking on Google API, can the business survive? Another question is... how will you make money?
reaperducer 6y ago
Deep Searching: the inclusion of relevant results from other targeted search engines to deliver better results quicker. That doesn't sound like "deep" searching to me. That sounds like search aggregation, like DogPile used to do a couple of decades ago. To me, "deep searching" would mean the company has its own crawler that indexes the content that the other search engines ignore or discard because it hasn't been updated in the last six hours. The world is losing its knowledgebase because companies like Google only care about what's trending, not what's information. I want a search engine that shows me all the things that Google has decided aren't important because they're not trendy. Show me the stale web. Show me things that are so good they don't need to be repackaged every six months. Show me hobby sites, reference sites, stores of knowledge that don't exist solely to play the SEO game. Show me things I can't get anywhere else. I'll give Runnaroo a chance. Hopefully it doesn't disappoint. The world doesn't need another bubblegum search engine.
- gverrilla 6y ago
  Maybe reverse-SEO would be good: list higher those sites with less SEO-complicance lol I have an analogy: I'm new to programming and have been trying to build a web app using python. I went through a lot of websites and youtube videos, and the most fancy-looking ones where more often than not incomplete or bad. When there was a video and the "youtuber" would hit me asking for subscription or like all the time, or fancy 3d animations etc, I would know quality of content itself probably wouldn't be very good. Not to my surprise, the best tutorial I have found features a guy with his webcam only, with nothing fancy at all - you might call it a sloppy "production", if you want, but it's far better than anything else I've seen! - and it was never a top ranked search for my queries oon google. For anyone wondering, I'm talking about grinberg's mega-tutorial on flask (https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com).
  - mikalauskas 6y ago
    I would say, his videos are far from sloppy. High quality microphone and video itself is pretty fancy.
6510 6y ago
very nice, ill be using this from now on. Thanks!
nabilhat 6y ago
I've been collecting upstart search engines since DDG started ignoring search syntax instructions. It passes my first test: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=%22do+any+of+these+results+contain+this+text%22 https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=%22do+any+of+these+resu... ...More accurately than DDG, which returns lots of results, all of which do not contain that text. Other searches so far have been far less swamped by topten trash as well. Thanks! I'll add this one to my list of search engines to try when I need accurate results.
- Darkphibre 6y ago
  Do you have that list available anywhere? I'd be very interested in that.
ianwalter 6y ago
Looks good and I'm going to try it as my default search engine for a bit. There are a handful of small UI issues that make me wish it were open source so I could fix them.
kart23 6y ago
Results are really good upon first glance. Dark mode please! Just a quick UI tip: theres a reason that neither DDG, Google, or even HN don't have cards or separators for each result. I think the backgrounds of each result make them all look the same, and it's kind of impacting readability. My mind gets distracted by the rectangles and the shadows, and its just one more thing to sort through mentally.
jtolds 6y ago
this reminds me of dogpile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile is everything old new again? have we hit some sort of cyclic point in internet search quality where we need this once more? dogpile was ended when pagerank showed up.
- markstos 6y ago
  Agreed. Meta-searchers have been tried many times. It's not clear how this will succeed where those failed.
muhammadusman 6y ago
what's the business model supporting this?
ttul 6y ago
It’s easy to make a decent small search engine: nobody is working to game your algorithm. Vastly harder to do this as you scale to google size and popularity.
- mgreg 6y ago
  That's a great argument for a more diverse set of search competitors, especially with their own index. Imagine if we had 10 viable search engines rather than just the 1 (or 1.5) we currently have. With multiple ranking algorithms a SEO-bait site would work on one or two but unlikely on all 10.
  - ttul 6y ago
    I think competition is awesome. Just don’t underestimate how steep the learning curve is once you become a little bit popular.
chris_f 6y ago
Wow! Thank you everyone for checking Runnaroo out. I shared it this morning mostly on a whim, and definitely did not prepare even close for the level of traffic being on the front page of Hacker News would bring. Runnaroo has been my solo side project for the last few months because I believed a better web search was possible, and I greatly appreciate all the constructive feedback. I am bringing the site down for the next few hours to address some issues, but will have it up again soon. Apologies for any timeouts!
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  Do you have a starter story or something? I'd love to hear more about your tech stack, how you source search results via api's, scraping, how much data on serps do you store or is it mostly just in the background via api's ? I can imagine being more like google would cost google amounts just to keep server farms of data. How are you managing server costs is your monthly bill huge or do you run it all on small infrastructure somehow? I've been wanting to ship anything besides doing my freelance work, but never get there, totally inspired to launch something this year. Thanks, for showing what one person can build!
benbristow 6y ago
Search seems to be down due to the HN hug of death (as stated on the landing page). Looking forward to giving this a bash whenever it comes back up again.
gverrilla 6y ago
google is most certainly broken it's a catalog, not a search engine will give runnaroo a few tries! gl thanks
miki123211 6y ago
I think there's still a lot to be done in search engines when contextual and personalized results are concerned. I want my search engine to search not just the public internet, but also the niche stuff only I have access to. If I type "pizza", I want local pizzerias. If I type a name of a friend, I want to see their Facebook profile, as well as our conversations on Messenger, Slack and WhatsApp web. If I type "xxx crashing with code 608", where xxx is an internal service of some organization I work for, I want to see past Github issues, Slack conversations, Sentry reports and Jira tickets. The fact my search engine can't search my emails, conversations and private resources makes it much, much less useful than it could have been. I genuinely don't understand why people dislike it so much when software processes information about them, for their own benefit. I use Google, Facebook etc. a lot, and I've never witnessed any bad consequences of being tracked. If not for that strange aversion, technology could be so, so much better.
- mwcampbell 6y ago
  > I genuinely don't understand why people dislike it so much when software processes information about them, for their own benefit. I use Google, Facebook etc. a lot, and I've never witnessed any bad consequences of being tracked. If not for that strange aversion, technology could be so, so much better. I think it's partly because we in the western world have a lot of exposure to hypothetical dystopias in our entertainment and rhetoric. And that's probably based in part on the paranoia that we had during the Cold War. I wonder if it's different in Eastern Europe, where you are IIRC. On a related topic, how would you feel about websites being able to know that you're running a screen reader? In the American blind community, many have expressed concerns about possible discrimination against blind people. I would be in favor, but then I'm partially sighted (low vision).
  - miki123211 6y ago
    Definitely in favor, as long as I can disable that, i.e. in incognito mode. There are some things that could work so, so much better, especially with some modern frameworks (think Flutter) that don't render to DOM unless absolutely necessary. There would be no accessibility mode buttons, everything would, you know, just work.
whycombagator 6y ago
> Unfortunately, we are temporarily taking the site down while we perform some updates. Apologies to our existing users. We are working to get back up to be better than before. Nice
javitury 6y ago
Runnaroo has become my default search engine since a couple of months. 1. Search results are more relevant. In comparison to google. I noticed a reduction in spammy results like slant, fake blogs, gitmemory, etc. There is still room for improvement. 2. Claims to respect users' privacy 3. Languages other than English are handled fine. In this regard runnaroo is usable for everyday searches, unlike DDG. Queries in a foreign language produce results of the same or lower quality than those from google. I know the author is reading this, so here is some feedback. - Make the search engine available for firefox mobile. I know there is an extension but it can't be installed on phones. - Improve the behavior of the search box in mobile phones. - Keep on fighting spammy results
- nickexyz 6y ago
  I just realized today that you can long-press the search field to add the search engine in Firefox for Android. Not really that obvious, but there are instructions in Settings->Search.
jmakov 6y ago
Howto "Show HN": post a project, ignore all best (technical) practices discussed on HN, update your site to "Unfortunately, we are temporarily taking the site down..."
lord-squirrel 6y ago
What is your technology stack and how do you plan to scale it in the future?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gremlinsinc 6y ago
I wanted so hard to love DDG, but it failed so hard esp for developer questions (90% of my searches).... but DAMN this is what I wanted in a replacement. I've already replaced google, though native dark mode would be cool, but I can just use stylish for that ;)
sourcex 6y ago
Why did you name it Runnaroo? Search engine are supposed to be easy to spell and type. During the last 3 days of my usage, I misspelt Runnaroo every 3rd time I opened it.
ibdf 6y ago
I've been using it since this was posted here. I am ok with the search results, given the privacy I get back.. I do miss the google cards though... type EPL get all results for the Premiere League... type NBA get all games coming up... type movies and see what's coming out near me.

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chris_f 6y ago

Hi HN! I'm the creator of Runnaroo. The title is a fun little rib at Neeva, which has been getting a lot of press recently. I initially launched Runnaroo in a Show HN [0] at the end of February, and wanted to do a followup because the site has grown considerably in features and users over the last fews of months. The core idea of Runnaroo revolves around a search engine of federated data sources to provide the most relevant and highest quality results. We are now over 50 Deep Search sources, and adding more weekly. Some examples of queries that I believe provide better results than peer search engines. react.js: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=react.js https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=react.js creatine effects research: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=creatine+effects+research https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=creatine+effects+resear... metallica tabs: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=Metallica+tabs https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=Metallica+tabs parkinson podcast: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=parkinson+podcast https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=parkinson+podcast bootstrap collapse link: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=bootstrap+collapse+link https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=bootstrap+collapse+link [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22422604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22422604

chris_f 6y ago
Also, just as a point of reference, here are the same queries on DuckDuckGo. react.js: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=react.js&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=react.js&ia=web creatine effects research: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=creatine+effects+research&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=creatine+effects+research&ia=web metallica tabs: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=metallica+tabs&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=metallica+tabs&ia=web parkinson podcast: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=parkinson+podcast&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=parkinson+podcast&ia=web bootstrap collapse link: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bootstrap+collapse+link&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bootstrap+collapse+link&ia=web
- tgb 6y ago
  You've got a typo in your second link! Confused me for a second.
  - chris_f 6y ago
    Updated. Thanks.
aboringusername 6y ago
I think you've done something very interesting that makes me rethink the idea of a "search engine". For all the data Google has, and all the AI and technology, their search isn't very "smart" at allowing you to contextualize or filter the searches very well. For example, a button to remove social, to offer meta-data (such as whether a question is answered/unanswered) or offer features that might help me find what I am looking for. Google has a huge index, but naturally, there's going to be 'noise', and maybe I want to see what's on page 50, or want to try and 'filter' some of the more popular sites. Their UI for enabling this is non-existent. Another example: Google BigQuery has the entire Reddit archive, they could surface meta-data such as the number of comments or whether entire comment chains are deleted (although, doing that against Reddit's API at scale would be a very difficult challenge and perhaps not welcomed by reddit). But to me, as a user of search, that might influence what content I end up viewing, because perhaps a thread with 0 comments isn't so useful to me, or a thread full of [deleted] comments is worthless and should be de-indexed (and deciding what is valuable is a very hard question to answer).
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  I think all search engines fail in providing a list of ordered results. What you actually want is a look at the graph that they were plucked from. As things stand, it's not just a case of being unable to see the forest for the trees, but being unable to see the forest because you are forced to infer its structure from a small basket of leaves. The only company I've seen attempt anything like this is the (criminally under-recognized) carrotsearch.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    Do you mean https://search.carrot2.org/ https://search.carrot2.org/?
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
      If he does, I can see why it's not popular. I tried a single query and was told my search limits been exceeded.
marban 6y ago
If you're interested in doing something with News hit me up. https://yetigogo.com https://yetigogo.com thomas.me
cookiengineer 6y ago
How does Runnaroo compare to search engines like duckduckgo, searx.me and in the sense of openness and accessible source codes? Is it open source? Does it have an openly accessible plugin/search feature ecosystem? How do you think people would trust you when it comes to the privacy aspects?
- chris_f 6y ago
  All good questions. Trust will only come with time and a track record of making user centric decisions. Runnaroo currently does not save any information on user search queries, and a core element of the tool is the privacy aspect. If you need an open source hackable search engine, Searx is a better choice, and the most privacy centric option because you can run your own instance.
RestlessMind 6y ago
Interesting site, and we definitely need more options for search. What is your business model?
- Splendor 6y ago
  I'm not OP, but they answered this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23773713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23773713
SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
This is intriguing. Have you considered allowing external developers to provide Deep Search integrations? I'm imagining a platform where developers can submit Deep Search modules that would run in a sandbox with access to your index, metadata stores and knowledge graph. These modules would return a confidence score and results for a given query, with no ability to snoop on users by exfiltrating data. They could answer a single query or handle an entire domain. The best ones would rise in prominence according to their performance. One big hurdle is that developers would have to be properly incentivized to return accurate results, but if that can be achieved, you could end up with something that is way better than Google.
dang 6y ago
(If anyone is missing a rib, the submitted title was "Show HN: Runnaroo – A new search engine that didn't raise 37.5M to launch")
- ebg13 6y ago
  > If anyone is missing a rib What do you mean by that?
  - dang 6y ago
    The GP mentioned that the title originally included a "rib". We took that part out of the title. Some people might read the GP comment and wonder what it was talking about. When we make a change to a title or URL and notice a comment whose meaning is affected by the change, I try to reply with the missing information.
thewarrior 6y ago
It seems that its using Google search results as raw input and re ranking them. How do you get access to google search results ?
- thruflo22 6y ago
  Yup, Google T&Cs explicitly forbid. So it’s either breaking them or got a deal with Google?
  - rvnx 6y ago
    Knowing how Google works there is no deal
- puranjay 6y ago
  For complex queries, my results are distinctly different than Google
- zelly 6y ago
  Probably scraping with a sea of proxy IPs or a rented botnet One could test this hypothesis by doing the same thing to it--spamming search queries from numerous IPs--to see if Runnaroo's IPs stop working (get 429'd or captchawalled). I don't really have time to whiteknight for G, but OP should be prepared for them to take notice. (Maybe create a global rate limit.) I'm interested in how the ranking algorithm works because it seems really good. Edit: Runaroo is now down. Looks like he was ahead of me on the global rate limit suggestion.
temp231239 6y ago
One think that I would like to see solved by indie search engines is the ability to break the search bubble and see whats usually hidden on 10th page of google search results. This is a serious problem in all big search engines. One interesting way to solve search bubble problem is to have an option to filter out results from high traffic websites and blogs who invest heavily in CEO and pollute search results. Having this filter will surely open a completely different world of information that's very hard to search.
- skratlo 6y ago
  This is so on point, thanks for that. Pollution is indeed the right word for it.
- Flashtoo 6y ago
  > have an option to filter out results from high traffic websites That's what Million Short does https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/
  - fireattack 6y ago
    The first thing I searched, it shows Oops.. sorry about that!Engineers have been notified and are looking into the issue. If you see a captcha, be sure to fill it out and submit to continue your search Edit: it looks like it doesn't support anything that is not in Latin letters at all.
  - ornornor 6y ago
    Thanks, worked well for me and I found information I couldn’t find on ddg.
  - Darkphibre 6y ago
    Good grief, this is astonishing. The other day I tried tracking down the names for various avatar species in VRChat. Surely someone had a list curated... but bing, google, and ddg all let me down with ancient wikis or completely unrelated sites, no matter my quoting or alternate search terms (animals, avatars, creatures, etc.). Very first hit on millionshort: https://www.vrcarena.com/ https://www.vrcarena.com/ Edit: Though, I'm still trying to track down a more comprehensive list. That one's missing Nanachis, which are rather common these days.
nbardy 6y ago
Well done. The rect page is better for sure. Runnaroo is lacking in design Visually everything is very similar and hard to quickly parse. I want to immediately be able to scan results to tell what url's they are from. Two issues, the url is light grey and blends in with the text body. There is no favicon.
still_grokking 6y ago
It passed my "search engine quick test" :-) I've tried "metacircularevaluator" as a search term. The results are relevant and good. Will have an eye on this one!
- inetsee 6y ago
  My search engine quick test is "lojban" and Runnaroo's results were among the best I've seen. I've been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine of choice 95%+ of the time, only falling back to Google if DDG's results seem weak. I've added Runnaroo to my bookmarks toolbar. I'm going to try it out as my second choice search engine, demoting Google to third place.
markandrewj 6y ago
I just wanted to say that I was impressed by privacy statement being short and clear. I clicked on the privacy link expecting multiple pages of overly complicated writing.
tmikaeld 6y ago
Are date filters planned?
- chris_f 6y ago
  Absolutely.
mesaframe 6y ago
You are saying Neeva is getting a lot of press. But, This is the first time I read about that.
zerr 6y ago
What about the tech behind?
puranjay 6y ago
Man this is really, really good stuff! In a few test searches, you beat Google. I tried this search on Runnaroo and Google: "black muscular guy in 99" (I meant to search for Terry Crews from Brooklyn 99). Google just showed me some random Pinterest page as the 1st result, followed by results from YouTube, Facebook, and Google Books. But on Runnaroo, Terry Crews was the result in the right sidebar. It was also the 3rd result. This is the first time a search engine has excited me in years. Very impressed.
ori_b 6y ago
Do you index the web yourself?
noncoml 6y ago
May I ask how do you plan to monetize this? I like your privacy policy, but unless there is a good financial plan behind it, I have trouble seeing how it can be sustained
- rebel1 6y ago
  Great question. I answered in a another post: I wish something like the Web Monetization API was a viable path to monetization, but I don't think it is in the current state. I believe the only current path to monetization that preserves user privacy is context based display ads that work like billboards in the real world. I am working on that now, but the idea is a flat fee to display the ad for N days regardless of views or clicks. It is certainly challenging, but DDG and Startpage both exist and seem to be profitable. The key is to monetize and 1.) ensure user privacy, 2.) ensure the monetization method doesn't create perverse incentives in contention of providing better search results for users.
  - noncoml 6y ago
    thank you!
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    How aggressively are you willing to moderate and kill bad ads? The biggest issue I see with Google/Bing/AOL/Yahoo Search (and even DDG!) is malicious advertising. It's led me to the general view that any search ads are hostile by default, and I've often found outright dysfunction when it comes to shutting down bad actors. The other issue I'd be curious about is your position on trademark squatting. i.e., where if I'm Best Buy, my competitors can buy ads over the search term "best buy", so if I want my own site to be the first "result" for my own business name, I have to buy ads.
    - elcomet 6y ago
      Maybe the answer is that you buy display time, but with no keywords. Like in the real world, everyone will see the ad. Or you can just buy ads for a given "theme" and the search engine will try to interpret queries and assign theme the most close theme, displaying relevant ads.
randomstring 6y ago
Uhg. Site is down at the moment. Even these suggested searches are returning an error page. Top Tip to future search engine builders: cache, cache, cache. Especially the canned searches on you press releases and HackerNews posts.
- rebel1 6y ago
  Fair enough. It will be down for a little while. Good lesson for the future.
Exuma 6y ago
What is a federated data source?
nycdatasci 6y ago
This maintenance seems poorly timed: "Thank you for checking out Runnaroo! Unfortunetely, we are temporarily taking the site down while we perform some updates. Apologies to our existing users. We are working to get back up to be better than before."
- FPGAhacker 6y ago
  Typo too.
- chris_f 6y ago
  Ha, you're telling me! Yeah, taking the site down was directly related to the Hacker News post. It will be temporary though.
riquito 6y ago
Any plans to allow users to blacklist domains? Even post search would be fabulous
blux 6y ago
Hi Chris! Looks great! Are you considering a domain blacklist feature? For example, when searching for C++ documentation, I rather never be served results from cplusplus.com.

speedgoose 6y ago

How to you get query results from Google without getting blocked?

wolco 6y ago
Pay...
- dumbfounder 6y ago
  Is that true? I didn’t think they had an api for search anymore. Maybe they use these guys? https://serpapi.com/ https://serpapi.com/
  - mgreg 6y ago
    I believe Startpage.com still has a deal with Google to repackage their search results. The search results are identical so not sure what terms Google puts on them.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  How? With Bing you can pay but they require you to not do anything with the results, such as caching, filtering, sorting, removing the tracking links... With Google it just seems not available.
  - Kiro 6y ago
    > removing the tracking links What does this mean? I don't see any Bing tracking links on DDG.
    - speedgoose 6y ago
      The Bing search API doesn't return the real links but tracking links. I guess DuckDuckGo or Qwant negotiated to get the real links.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dna_polymerase 6y ago

Tried a few queries, and the direct redirect when I type in facebook is more than questionable. If Google did this I couldn't properly research news or facts about facebook. It is a really questionable practice. That said, I would rather use this page than DDG, as long as I don't get lies about privacy stuffed in my face.

chris_f 6y ago
I call that a Quick Direct. It's not for everyone, and you can disable that feature under the advanced search options. Surprisingly (to me at least) that is the feature that resonates the most with non-technical users. A lot of people use Google just as a navigational tool to go to a website they know about. This saves them a step for some highly popular websites, but your point is still well taken.
- aboringusername 6y ago
  It would be okay if I typed in facebook.com or faecbook.com, sure. But not allowing me to see the index for "facebook" is really not what I expect from a search engine. What if I want to type "facebook" and see general information, or news? I can't as your search redirects me away. Maybe offer a card: "Do you want to visit Facebook?" would suit the best of both worlds. Or, if you must, a 10-second auto redirect. Anything but going straight to FB.
  - CobsterLock 6y ago
    from my anecdotal experience: having anything other than a hard redirect entirely misses the point of this feature. A click or waiting 10 seconds pretty much nullifies all the benefit. I think an opt-out is the best way to go. Any technical enough user that is bothered by it should be competent enough to disable it or be aware what happens when they are trying to get general information. Observing my dad using his iPad, he regularly types sites without the TLD with his only intention being to get over to facebook.com
  - hundchenkatze 6y ago

drcongo 6y ago

A couple of bits of feedback: 1. The searches I tried did return decent / good results, so well done! 2. The image search results page is not very useful / usable - there's no keyboard navigation or filtering (add "vector" as a filter and I'll be back regularly). 3. Dark mode would be nice. 4. What's your business model?

chris_f 6y ago
Appreciate the feedback, and I agree. The image (and news for that matter) search tabs are now kind of just a box check, but they are both on the roadmap to built out to be made much more usable. Adding a dark mode will be pretty simple and I can add it to the list. I wish something like the Web Monetization API [0] was a viable path to monetization, but I don't think it is in the current state. I believe the only current path to monetization that preserves user privacy is context based display ads that work like billboards in the real world. I am working on that now, but the idea is a flat fee to display the ad for N days regardless of views or clicks. [0] https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/
- drkstr 6y ago
  FYI I would happily pay a modest yearly subscription fee to any service that would save as much time as yours potentially does. Keep up the great work!
  - pedrocx486 6y ago
    +1, I loved how well it worked, I'd be willing to pay too.
- drcongo 6y ago
  Thanks for the response. I'm definitely going to keep an eye on this for the future. One other small thing to mention, default searches in Safari are chosen from a fixed list, DDG worked around this limitation before making it on to the list by releasing a Safari extension that switched out the default search which could be an option for you until the day you make that list.

darsoli 6y ago

Does this use one of the bigger search engines (Bing, Google) as an API, or is it fully custom rolled?

chris_f 6y ago
For the organic web results, it is using Google right now, Any Deep Search results provide the specific data source at the top of the result box.
- mgreg 6y ago
  While I didn't use them and have no comments on their search quality I did admire Cliqz for their ambition. They were building and running their own index until earlier this year. (https://cliqz.com/announcement.html https://cliqz.com/announcement.html) They open sources some components e.g. https://github.com/cliqz-oss/keyvi https://github.com/cliqz-oss/keyvi. I think any long-term search engine competitor will eventually need their own index though DDG is doing well financially so far.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

I tried searching for cmov gcc (url: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=cmov+gcc https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=cmov+gcc). Very impressive! Actually gives me stuff that's, I dunno, relevant. Actually included both words without me quoting them - I wish DDG did that - you normally need to search for "gcc" "cmov".

jedberg 6y ago

A small feedback: You have a circle on the page that says "A better search engine. Learn why →". But only the tiny text is clickable. It would be great if that whole circle was clickable. Bigger link targets are always better.

colesantiago 6y ago

Is Runnaroo open source? I cannot find the source code?

rohan1024 6y ago

This is great! Just for test I searched for "python read command output without check_output" and Runaroo has more relevant search than Google. Runaroo: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=python+read+command+output+without+check_output https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=python+read+command+out... Google: https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=python+read+command+output+without+check_output&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=pyt...

nickx720 6y ago

I love it. Please consider dark mode :)

munificent 6y ago

I was wondering about the business model for this: > We may also add an affiliate code to some results returned that result in small commissions being paid back to Runnaroo if you visit or make purchases at those sites. I don't have an opinion on this one way or another, but it's an interesting approach.

chris_f 6y ago
I took that from one of the ways that DDG monetizes results. It's more aspirational right now than actually in practice. I was briefly in the Amazon affiliate program, but they told me search engines aren't allowed as part of their TOS.
- mgreg 6y ago
  DDG has a deal with Amazon. All product searches show Amazon up above with payment for that. Not sure if it's exclusive or if DDG has deals with other eCommerce players.

mttjj 6y ago

Looks nice, thanks for sharing. I do find the three pieces of configuration to be inconsistent however. The first two have you flip a switch _on_ to turn something _off_. "Turn Off Quick Directs" and "Turn Off Deep Searching" would probably be better as "Quick Directs" and "Deep Searching" where the toggle defaults to the "on" state. They look very similar to iOS controls so I think the users' understanding of on/off state is already there. As for the third option "Strict Search On", "On" seems redundant at best and misleading at worst. Misleading because I'm not sure if the text is going to change when I toggle the switch. Meaning I don't know if this is a static label telling me what the setting is or a dynamic label telling me what the current state is. In summary, I would make the button text more consistent and change their default states: [x] Quick Directs [x] Deep Searching [] Strict Search As a side note, the controls are different on the main page vs the result pages. On the homepage they are switches while on the results pages they are check boxes.

chris_f 6y ago
Thank you! You wouldn't believe how long I messed with that when I first set it up. I just couldn't get it to click. On the differences between the pages, currently in the middle of a redesign. Everything will be consistent very soon.

old-gregg 6y ago

I do not know how you're doing it, but I just ran quite a few searches for obscure film photography and chemistry topics and the results were much better than DDG and less commercialized than Google. Very impressive!

carlsborg 6y ago

Hey this is good. Great work!

qwerty456127 6y ago

IT-related search results seem super relevant. I wish other subjects would work equally well. E.g. supplement/condition-related search could also result in links to sites like selfhacked.com in the top (the actual articles there include references to scientific papers to back every particular statement) which Google actively hides from its results despite it's among my first go-tos.

exabrial 6y ago

All I want from a search engine to the ability to search for an exact phrase once in awhile...

yoavm 6y ago

Was very skeptical - every time I try some new search engine it just gives really bad results. Tried some quite esoteric things and was very surprised - also for non-English content. Trying this as my default search now! Congrats. Edit: suggestions could be useful. For now, I'm editing the Firefox plugin to get suggestions from Google.

matchbok 6y ago

I mean, this just uses the Google API. So, nothing new here. Your entire business relies on them.

Kiro 6y ago
All alternative search engines rely on either Google or Bing.

DonnyV 6y ago

Would love to know how they have access to Google index? Which is listed as a source.

davidajackson 6y ago

That's cool that if you search youtube it takes you right to youtube. Google doesn't do that.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

RobLach 6y ago

I wish the about page had some information about the people who built this because I feel trust is increasingly important in my rubric for choosing what services I use.

gavribirnbaum 6y ago

why is it that all search engines still look like Google in the 90's. Can't the UI become fresher? also I think SEO really ruined the search experience. do you have plans to use other ranking factors? Maybe social upvoting or so to improve ranking of actual good content as opposed to crappy listicles which is 50% of search results right now?

nerflad 6y ago

I appreciate how in image searches, you appear to be filtering dupes.

simonw 6y ago

It's a bit weird that searching for "twitter" redirects me straight to https://twitter.com/ https://twitter.com/ - I understand the intent there but I'd rather get search results - I know how to navigate using my browser URL bar.

simonw 6y ago
Looks like that's covered here already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23771401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23771401

simpsond 6y ago

Nice work! One bug/feature I noticed: Once focused on the image tab, if I revise my search, the image tab loses focus and the primary search results tab gains focus. It wasn’t the expected behavior for me.

totaldude87 6y ago

i like the way it orders the search results and not listing meaningless more pages of results. One thing i found while searching images is that, i cant start a new image search , because it brings me back to the "all" tab. ex: search harry potter go to images , now i wanted to search for hermione images alone, but it takes me all back to full web results.

agotterer 6y ago

I searched for "common" - https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=common https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=common and noticed the first result had a json payload as the description, which isn't visible on the site. Seems like a possible bug.

fireattack 6y ago

Why does it use "https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=" https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=" style URL for general information from Wikipedia? Doesn't seem very convenient.

didip 6y ago

hohoho, wow. Tried quite a few searches and the results are very relevant. This is great. If this is just piggybacking on Google API, can the business survive? Another question is... how will you make money?

reaperducer 6y ago

Deep Searching: the inclusion of relevant results from other targeted search engines to deliver better results quicker. That doesn't sound like "deep" searching to me. That sounds like search aggregation, like DogPile used to do a couple of decades ago. To me, "deep searching" would mean the company has its own crawler that indexes the content that the other search engines ignore or discard because it hasn't been updated in the last six hours. The world is losing its knowledgebase because companies like Google only care about what's trending, not what's information. I want a search engine that shows me all the things that Google has decided aren't important because they're not trendy. Show me the stale web. Show me things that are so good they don't need to be repackaged every six months. Show me hobby sites, reference sites, stores of knowledge that don't exist solely to play the SEO game. Show me things I can't get anywhere else. I'll give Runnaroo a chance. Hopefully it doesn't disappoint. The world doesn't need another bubblegum search engine.

gverrilla 6y ago
Maybe reverse-SEO would be good: list higher those sites with less SEO-complicance lol I have an analogy: I'm new to programming and have been trying to build a web app using python. I went through a lot of websites and youtube videos, and the most fancy-looking ones where more often than not incomplete or bad. When there was a video and the "youtuber" would hit me asking for subscription or like all the time, or fancy 3d animations etc, I would know quality of content itself probably wouldn't be very good. Not to my surprise, the best tutorial I have found features a guy with his webcam only, with nothing fancy at all - you might call it a sloppy "production", if you want, but it's far better than anything else I've seen! - and it was never a top ranked search for my queries oon google. For anyone wondering, I'm talking about grinberg's mega-tutorial on flask (https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com).
- mikalauskas 6y ago
  I would say, his videos are far from sloppy. High quality microphone and video itself is pretty fancy.

6510 6y ago

very nice, ill be using this from now on. Thanks!

nabilhat 6y ago

I've been collecting upstart search engines since DDG started ignoring search syntax instructions. It passes my first test: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=%22do+any+of+these+results+contain+this+text%22 https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=%22do+any+of+these+resu... ...More accurately than DDG, which returns lots of results, all of which do not contain that text. Other searches so far have been far less swamped by topten trash as well. Thanks! I'll add this one to my list of search engines to try when I need accurate results.

Darkphibre 6y ago
Do you have that list available anywhere? I'd be very interested in that.

ianwalter 6y ago

Looks good and I'm going to try it as my default search engine for a bit. There are a handful of small UI issues that make me wish it were open source so I could fix them.

kart23 6y ago

Results are really good upon first glance. Dark mode please! Just a quick UI tip: theres a reason that neither DDG, Google, or even HN don't have cards or separators for each result. I think the backgrounds of each result make them all look the same, and it's kind of impacting readability. My mind gets distracted by the rectangles and the shadows, and its just one more thing to sort through mentally.

jtolds 6y ago

this reminds me of dogpile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile is everything old new again? have we hit some sort of cyclic point in internet search quality where we need this once more? dogpile was ended when pagerank showed up.

markstos 6y ago
Agreed. Meta-searchers have been tried many times. It's not clear how this will succeed where those failed.

muhammadusman 6y ago

what's the business model supporting this?

ttul 6y ago

It’s easy to make a decent small search engine: nobody is working to game your algorithm. Vastly harder to do this as you scale to google size and popularity.

mgreg 6y ago
That's a great argument for a more diverse set of search competitors, especially with their own index. Imagine if we had 10 viable search engines rather than just the 1 (or 1.5) we currently have. With multiple ranking algorithms a SEO-bait site would work on one or two but unlikely on all 10.
- ttul 6y ago
  I think competition is awesome. Just don’t underestimate how steep the learning curve is once you become a little bit popular.

chris_f 6y ago

Wow! Thank you everyone for checking Runnaroo out. I shared it this morning mostly on a whim, and definitely did not prepare even close for the level of traffic being on the front page of Hacker News would bring. Runnaroo has been my solo side project for the last few months because I believed a better web search was possible, and I greatly appreciate all the constructive feedback. I am bringing the site down for the next few hours to address some issues, but will have it up again soon. Apologies for any timeouts!

gremlinsinc 6y ago
Do you have a starter story or something? I'd love to hear more about your tech stack, how you source search results via api's, scraping, how much data on serps do you store or is it mostly just in the background via api's ? I can imagine being more like google would cost google amounts just to keep server farms of data. How are you managing server costs is your monthly bill huge or do you run it all on small infrastructure somehow? I've been wanting to ship anything besides doing my freelance work, but never get there, totally inspired to launch something this year. Thanks, for showing what one person can build!

benbristow 6y ago

Search seems to be down due to the HN hug of death (as stated on the landing page). Looking forward to giving this a bash whenever it comes back up again.

gverrilla 6y ago

google is most certainly broken it's a catalog, not a search engine will give runnaroo a few tries! gl thanks

miki123211 6y ago

I think there's still a lot to be done in search engines when contextual and personalized results are concerned. I want my search engine to search not just the public internet, but also the niche stuff only I have access to. If I type "pizza", I want local pizzerias. If I type a name of a friend, I want to see their Facebook profile, as well as our conversations on Messenger, Slack and WhatsApp web. If I type "xxx crashing with code 608", where xxx is an internal service of some organization I work for, I want to see past Github issues, Slack conversations, Sentry reports and Jira tickets. The fact my search engine can't search my emails, conversations and private resources makes it much, much less useful than it could have been. I genuinely don't understand why people dislike it so much when software processes information about them, for their own benefit. I use Google, Facebook etc. a lot, and I've never witnessed any bad consequences of being tracked. If not for that strange aversion, technology could be so, so much better.

mwcampbell 6y ago
> I genuinely don't understand why people dislike it so much when software processes information about them, for their own benefit. I use Google, Facebook etc. a lot, and I've never witnessed any bad consequences of being tracked. If not for that strange aversion, technology could be so, so much better. I think it's partly because we in the western world have a lot of exposure to hypothetical dystopias in our entertainment and rhetoric. And that's probably based in part on the paranoia that we had during the Cold War. I wonder if it's different in Eastern Europe, where you are IIRC. On a related topic, how would you feel about websites being able to know that you're running a screen reader? In the American blind community, many have expressed concerns about possible discrimination against blind people. I would be in favor, but then I'm partially sighted (low vision).
- miki123211 6y ago
  Definitely in favor, as long as I can disable that, i.e. in incognito mode. There are some things that could work so, so much better, especially with some modern frameworks (think Flutter) that don't render to DOM unless absolutely necessary. There would be no accessibility mode buttons, everything would, you know, just work.

whycombagator 6y ago

> Unfortunately, we are temporarily taking the site down while we perform some updates. Apologies to our existing users. We are working to get back up to be better than before. Nice

javitury 6y ago

Runnaroo has become my default search engine since a couple of months. 1. Search results are more relevant. In comparison to google. I noticed a reduction in spammy results like slant, fake blogs, gitmemory, etc. There is still room for improvement. 2. Claims to respect users' privacy 3. Languages other than English are handled fine. In this regard runnaroo is usable for everyday searches, unlike DDG. Queries in a foreign language produce results of the same or lower quality than those from google. I know the author is reading this, so here is some feedback. - Make the search engine available for firefox mobile. I know there is an extension but it can't be installed on phones. - Improve the behavior of the search box in mobile phones. - Keep on fighting spammy results

nickexyz 6y ago
I just realized today that you can long-press the search field to add the search engine in Firefox for Android. Not really that obvious, but there are instructions in Settings->Search.

jmakov 6y ago

Howto "Show HN": post a project, ignore all best (technical) practices discussed on HN, update your site to "Unfortunately, we are temporarily taking the site down..."

lord-squirrel 6y ago

What is your technology stack and how do you plan to scale it in the future?

deleted 6y ago

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gremlinsinc 6y ago

I wanted so hard to love DDG, but it failed so hard esp for developer questions (90% of my searches).... but DAMN this is what I wanted in a replacement. I've already replaced google, though native dark mode would be cool, but I can just use stylish for that ;)

sourcex 6y ago

Why did you name it Runnaroo? Search engine are supposed to be easy to spell and type. During the last 3 days of my usage, I misspelt Runnaroo every 3rd time I opened it.

ibdf 6y ago

I've been using it since this was posted here. I am ok with the search results, given the privacy I get back.. I do miss the google cards though... type EPL get all results for the Premiere League... type NBA get all games coming up... type movies and see what's coming out near me.