Runnaroo search engine has been taken down indefinitely
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: Runnaroo search engine has been taken down indefinitely
#2Right now, all searches return this text for me:
"I've taken Runnaroo down due to the ever increasing number of bots scraping the site.
Not sure if it will be back.
Thank you to all of those who have used Runnaroo over the last year!
I'm going for a run.
-Chris"
Re: Runnaroo search engine has been taken down indefinitely
#3After using Runnaroo as my default search engine for the last ~9 months, I gotta say this is a huge bummer. The results were great 99.9% of the time and everything worked wonderfully or gave me a way to quickly get to a better service (such as image search -> Google image search). Quite a shock getting a "Not sure if it will be back" message when trying to do a quick search.
RIP
Re: Runnaroo search engine has been taken down indefinitely
#4After using Runnaroo as my default search engine for the last ~9 months, I gotta say this is a huge bummer. The results were great 99.9% of the time and everything worked wonderfully or gave me a way to quickly get to a better service (such as image search -> Google image search). Quite a shock getting a "Not sure if it will be back" message when trying to do a quick search. RIP
Thank you so much for the kind words! It was very much a labor of love as there was no tracking, ads, or really any significant attempt at monetization.
I was actually happy keeping it up for all of the users such as yourself, but it started to become not worth the effort as it grew and more and more people would abuse the service.
Runnaroo is a one-man side project operation, and I hope it has shown what is possible in the search engine space with minimal resources.
Re: Runnaroo search engine has been taken down indefinitely
#5After using Runnaroo as my default search engine for the last ~9 months, I gotta say this is a huge bummer. The results were great 99.9% of the time and everything worked wonderfully or gave me a way to quickly get to a better service (such as image search -> Google image search). Quite a shock getting a "Not sure if it will be back" message when trying to do a quick search. RIP
Thank you so much for the kind words! It was very much a labor of love as there was no tracking, ads, or really any significant attempt at monetization. I was actually happy keeping it up for all of the users such as yourself, but it started to become not worth the effort as it grew and more and more people would abuse the service. Runnaroo is a one-man side project operation, and I hope it has shown what is possible…
What would it take to keep Runnaroo online? I've combed through enough apache logs to have a rough idea of what kind of bot traffic you might be dealing with, but not entirely sure of how best to mitigate other than naive IP blocking and scaling out to meet traffic demands...
Re: Runnaroo search engine has been taken down indefinitely
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you so much for the kind words! It was very much a labor of love as there was no tracking, ads, or really any significant attempt at monetization. I was actually happy keeping it up for all of the users such as yourself, but it started to become not worth the effort as it grew and more and more people would abuse the service. Runnaroo is a one-man side project operation, and I hope it has shown what is possible…
What would it take to keep Runnaroo online? I've combed through enough apache logs to have a rough idea of what kind of bot traffic you might be dealing with, but not entirely sure of how best to mitigate other than naive IP blocking and scaling out to meet traffic demands...
Please ping me at contact at runnaroo.com if you don't mind.
Re: Runnaroo search engine has been taken down indefinitely
#7While I understand the difficulty of running something like this, I'm sad to lose it. I found it to be a truly excellent search experience that I'd been recommending to friends for a while now. Hopefully there's some way this gets picked up for something bigger or finds some way to survive, and good on the dev for making it work for as long as they did!
Re: Runnaroo search engine has been taken down indefinitely
#8A sad day indeed, Runnaroo was a great search engine.
Re: Runnaroo search engine has been taken down indefinitely
#9Thank you for all the kind words! I'm the creator of Runnaroo.
Runnaroo started as just a fun experiment, but it quickly became apparent that you could launch a meta-search engine better than just about everything out there (including DDG [0]), and I was frankly surprised how quickly it was embraced by such a large number of people (it's Show:HN reached the #2 spot [1]).
The challenge then became how to fund the cost of the site in an ethical way in line with the site's core principles. I started looking at different solutions [2], including becoming the first search engine to implement Web Monetization, but I never really even came close.
I believe Runnaroo will live on in some iteration, I just have to figure out what that would be.
Also, if you used Runnaroo and liked it, please don't hesitate to reach out (anything AT runnaroo.com). It has been a solo project, but I'm sure the future will involve more collaboration.
I would also be interested in sharing the story of how Runnaroo evolved over the last year, and the different experiences of launching a search engine if anyone is interested or has a platform for those conversations.
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[0] Don't take my word for it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24248666
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23771131
[2] https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-Moneti...
Re: Runnaroo search engine has been taken down indefinitely
#10I have been using your search engine for several months. A real shame, it's the best performing of all the privacy focused ones I've tried.
Thanks for your work and effort.