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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
...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.
I searched for "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.
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!
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.
It's a bit weird that searching for "twitter" redirects me straight to 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] chris_f|5 years ago|reply
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
creatine effects research: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=creatine+effects+resear...
metallica tabs: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=Metallica+tabs
parkinson podcast: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=parkinson+podcast
bootstrap collapse link: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=bootstrap+collapse+link
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22422604
[+] [-] temp231239|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aboringusername|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] puranjay|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cookiengineer|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] RestlessMind|5 years ago|reply
What is your business model?
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SheinhardtWigCo|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] still_grokking|5 years ago|reply
I've tried "metacircularevaluator" as a search term. The results are relevant and good. Will have an eye on this one!
[+] [-] chris_f|5 years ago|reply
react.js: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=react.js&ia=web
creatine effects research: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=creatine+effects+research&ia=web
metallica tabs: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=metallica+tabs&ia=web
parkinson podcast: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=parkinson+podcast&ia=web
bootstrap collapse link: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bootstrap+collapse+link&ia=web
[+] [-] thewarrior|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomstring|5 years ago|reply
Top Tip to future search engine builders: cache, cache, cache. Especially the canned searches on you press releases and HackerNews posts.
[+] [-] blux|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noncoml|5 years ago|reply
I like your privacy policy, but unless there is a good financial plan behind it, I have trouble seeing how it can be sustained
[+] [-] marban|5 years ago|reply
thomas.me
[+] [-] nbardy|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nycdatasci|5 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] markandrewj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mesaframe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Exuma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riquito|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zerr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmikaeld|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ori_b|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mttjj|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
On the differences between the pages, currently in the middle of a redesign. Everything will be consistent very soon.
[+] [-] rohan1024|5 years ago|reply
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+out...
Google: https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=pyt...
[+] [-] chris_f|5 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] drcongo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_f|5 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] nabilhat|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agotterer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] old-gregg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yoavm|5 years ago|reply
Edit: suggestions could be useful. For now, I'm editing the Firefox plugin to get suggestions from Google.
[+] [-] speedgoose|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munificent|5 years ago|reply
> 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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miki123211|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] darsoli|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_f|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedberg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonnyV|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kart23|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] qwerty456127|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway_pdp09|5 years ago|reply
cmov gcc
(url: 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".