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Comment by chris_f | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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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.

This is so on point, thanks for that. Pollution is indeed the right word for it.

> have an option to filter out results from high traffic websites

That's what Million Short does https://millionshort.com/

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.

Thanks, worked well for me and I found information I couldn’t find on ddg.

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/

Edit: Though, I'm still trying to track down a more comprehensive list. That one's missing Nanachis, which are rather common these days.

That's also the first hit on DDG for avatar species in VRChat

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=avatar+species+in+VRChat&ia...

I don't know what to say. Yesterday, for me, it was no where on the first few pages.

That's the second link on google for me for "avatar species in VRChat"

I don't know what to say. Yesterday, for me, it was no where on the first few pages.

fwiw, It's not on google's first few pages for me on that exact same search, so you aren't going crazy.

This thread does show up though. There are so few relevant results that I wouldn't be surprised if this thread alone is giving enough weight to vrcarena.com to already be rolling out to some people, hence the discrepancy in these comments.

Wow I didn't think Google went this far to personalize results...

Okay, this is crazy. This week I spent 5-10 minutes scrambling my brain to find this article [1], it was the first search result for "no more free sodas" (now, to be fair, it's now the first result for me on Google, too).

Thanks for bringing this onto my radar, I've added it to my pile of cool links!

1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Thanks, this is super cool! I just used it to discover new music(search "electronics music albums" and removed the top million hits)

This needs to be front page.

It's always a shame that W3Schools comes up before literally any other reference, notably MDN. I've always attributed it to their SEO efforts.

W3Schools and now TutorialsPoint.

While they're not bad per say, they;re never detailed enough of a reference. 99% of my webdev searches are now "mdn <topic>" as MDN is typically the most detailed resource on the topic (short of reading the exhaustingly verbose standards).

Of course now that I search "mdn <topic>" for everything I'm not training google's engine to match <topic> with the mdn resource, which helps cement w3schools as the top result for the topic

> !mdn <term>

is the greatest tool of ddg. Hundreds of search shortcuts available as "bangs"

If you're using Firefox you can also go to MDN, right click the search box and click "Add a Keyword for this Search...". It's (almost) like a DDG Bang but local to your browser (and for me it's a lot faster too).

It gets even more crazy once you realize Firefox is just saving a bookmark with a form submission template and you can make forms that "send" GET requests to data URIs and if you combine that with the keyword search you can run tiny web apps from your bookmarks using "commands" in your omnibar!

My default engine is already set to DDG anyway, so I can just !bang in the addressbar already.

I find the ddg search results load faster and are better indexed than the MDN built-in search, same goes for most sites that do their own indexing and are also indexed on big search engines.

In my experience the search on MDN sucks, and I usually get much better MDN results by searching for "mdn <searchterm>" on DDG than I get for "<searchterm>" on mdn.

I use an extension aptly called 'Remove W3Schools' - I'll give you one guess as to what it does.

> This is a serious problem in all big search engines

I have never really understood why search engines do not let customers create blacklists of domains they do not want to see in the results. Are they really so cynical bastards that they understand that the crappy SEO results they cram down our throats are so good money to them that they can't afford us to hide them?

Google used to allow that like 15 years ago.

Yeah I think I remember being able to hide Yahoo Anwers in some native way. Would love to get rid of Pinterest from image searches.

From a UI perspective, how would this be implemented in a privacy friendly manner?

You mean without the search engine knowing what you are blacklisting?

Perhaps there is no good way, but in the case of Google, it seems like it wouldn’t change the privacy equation to have this not be private from them.

No, I mean, in what way can this feature be implemented and avoid sharing any PII (assuming the list itself is not PII, since that list could potentially be the same used by other users)? What about a text file hosted somewhere, and the only identifiable information is the cookie containing the link to that file?

Are you looking for a way to avoid linking an individual user’s fingerprints with a blacklist?

Yes, or rather: avoid that the blacklist becomes an individual user's fingerprints. Appreciate any suggestions on how to approach that.

Yes

Cuil did that, just in a surrealist way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuil

http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory

I was quite impressed from what I’ve seen so far. The most frustrating thing about google how unreliable/irrelevant the results are when your query has anything to to with something that can be payed for, you get immediately spammed by low quality commercial bs, while ddg is practically useless for very specific searches I.e an error message in an app etc.

I just want a reliable way to block affiliate link harvesting blogs. They are the fucking bane of the internet.

That would be number one on my list too. I normally skip but it can be endless until you got to a result that looks authentic and not some needy click farm.

Seriously, this. Try searching for anything even remotely medical related. 100% garbage in every search engine.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem. You can easily jump to page 10 of the results and scour from there if you'd like. They are paginated.

If the big search engines broke the supposed bubble and put page 10 results on page 1, well, there would exist the exact same "bubble."

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).

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.

Do you mean https://search.carrot2.org/?

If he does, I can see why it's not popular. I tried a single query and was told my search limits been exceeded.

I think you are _radically_ underestimating the cost (and overestimating the benefit) of adding a feature to Google's index.

When you are writing a small-scale search system over a specialized corpus where the index fits in the memory of a single machine it is easy to imagine and realize nifty features.

When your search engine draws 100MW you have a completely different perspective.

You're telling me that google makes $30 for every financial service ad I click but are cheaping out on the signal processing? Is the decline search result quality in the last couple years the result of a business analyst arbitraging sensitivity to result quality vs compute costs?

Only randos on HN think search quality is declining. If the search quality metrics that they use internally suffered a sustained decline, everyone from Sundar down would be fired.

They are declining, and I’ve met many non HN randos who agree. Quality doesn’t correlate with their metrics; likely some sort of mix of “engagement” and mostly how much they make from ads.

Confirm that. A lot of spam and SEO recently.

A whole ton of SEO. Any keyword from which you can make reasonable amounts of money will be cluttered with sites made by SEO people, who are really good at gaming the index, but really bad at anything else (i.e. actually giving proper information on the keyword you're searching for).

Spam has become an issue again in my native language. For a couple of years Google did a great job at removing spam, but somehow in the past 2 years it has resurfaced.

Rando here, subjectively it has been declining for my searches. In aggregate it might have become better so that my aunts' lousy searches are smartly reinterpreted, since el goog manages to "know the person" better than they know themselves. Not everyone wants that!

edit: this is surveillance capitalism at it's finest

Only randos on HN think that businesses don't have a fiduciary responsibility to share holders.

Search quality and profit are not always correlated.

I believe they do have that responsibility. But I also believe that shouldn't be their overriding responsibility.

well i guess that's unfalsifiable, since you're saying this on hn. i have been saying that the search result quality has been getting worse for years... not on every single query, just the long-tail queries that comprise the majority of my searches (guess i'm just an hn weirdo xd).

I don't think that "search quality" as perceived by end users is the metric that Google is trying to optimize - my guess is that their real goal is to maximize revenue from ads. Now if Google's ad revenue were to start declining, that would make their executives fear for their jobs.

Every public statement made on the record by Google search quality people, from Matt Cutts to Udi Manber to low-level engineers' tweets and blogs says that search quality never uses revenue as a metric and they don't generally even speak to the ads side of the business.

Subjectively, my search results have become more cluttered by loosely fitting results than what I'm actually searching for. Even when I'm trying to find a page I've been to before I often need to play keyword roulette and add half a dozen site bans for the likes of Pinterest, bit, quota, and the unpronouncable malware sites Google hasn't purged yet. This is a daily affair. When I'm searching for (generic consumer junk) the result is always available from Amazon,best buy,Wal-Mart,target,and the like. As soon as I stop searching for generic crap Google is worse today than they were years ago because these retailers, review spam sites, etc get boosted to the top of the results despite parameters in the query that should have filtered out these bad results.

In other words. The Google I see has gotten worse at product discovery, and finding relevant debug discussions.

If you feel that the results for your personal subset of queries are getting worse because Google is losing the fight against spam, that is a defensible position and we could discuss it.

The idea that Google intentionally trades away search quality to gain revenue is absurd and pretty much a loonie conspiracy theory.

I just looked at my Google search history and just judging from the last few searches it has been dead accurate. In particular, the result for "mass of a single nitrile glove" is amazing. The top result is an info box of glove mass by size. I don't even know how they do that. Compare the results of the same query on DDG. Those results are garbage.

That is, by the way, how Google defines "search quality". Thousands of paid analysts run searches on Google and Bing and rate the outcome.

Google's losing fight to spammers is a part of the problem.

I'm not arguing that Google is sacrificing quality for revenue. Though I'm sure Google has the run the numbers on such practices.

Instead, I'm arguing that Google search has lost some ability to differentiate between generic and specific. I'm thinking of any of countless cases where I give up on keyword bingo and make a phone call or post in a chat app to get the information I couldn't squeeze out of a Google search.

Google often chops and screws keywords that should not be.

Quoting does not yield expected results, even when I can ultimately find the exact quote on an eventually discovered result.

Fuzzy matches often pollute results for similar but distinct searches. Differentiation is not always easy or even possible.

Fuzzy matches regularly fuzz the wrong words for my searches.

Results often outdated by years or even over a decade.

Limiting by time often returns results outside the range. Mostly in the 'results' before the results.

I often find myself thinking some searches would be easier with a hand written regex.

You touched on what I was driving at in my original comment. There is no doubt whatsoever that if you were able to make a full pass over the corpus with a regular expression you could find docs you can't find on Google's search. But that's obviously not how their search works. They have to make it work at their scale, which dictates the format of the index, which in turn limits the possibilities for query operators. They have to make these design choices so that their product can exist at all.

"Grep the world" is a fine strategy for corpora up to a certain size, and I do wish there was a product that just stored everything I've ever seen and let me run expensive searches on that.

I think this fuzzy logic of search pisses off people like us (the HN demographic) but makes most users happy. Have you seen how tech illiterate people use Google? They type in questions and phrases with words like "a" and "the" in them. This is who google is optimizing for, because there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people like this for every one of us.

> the decline search result quality in the last couple years

[citation needed]

> 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.

Google exists to make money from 99.9% of users, the ones who don't read HN, so that's pretty normal if you don't find it accurate

While I do not agree with storing user-deleted information, you can change the "reddit" URL to "removeddit" to see most of the comments. Alternatively, "ceddit" will only show mod-deleted comments.

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.

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?

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.

Interesting site, and we definitely need more options for search.

What is your business model?

I'm not OP, but they answered this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23773713

(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")

> If anyone is missing a rib

What do you mean by that?

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.

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.

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!

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.

Also, just as a point of reference, here are the same queries on DuckDuckGo.

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

You've got a typo in your second link! Confused me for a second.

Updated. Thanks.

It seems that its using Google search results as raw input and re ranking them. How do you get access to google search results ?

Yup, Google T&Cs explicitly forbid. So it’s either breaking them or got a deal with Google?

Knowing how Google works there is no deal

For complex queries, my results are distinctly different than Google

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.

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.

Fair enough. It will be down for a little while. Good lesson for the future.

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.

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

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.

thank you!

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.

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.

The only way it would work is heavy moderation on the ads served.

Great question on trademark squatting, and I would love to hear the communities' thoughts.

If someone searches for 'nike shoes' and gets an ad for Reebok; is that useful to the user? Half of me thinks that it is not a relevant ad because the searcher clearly stated their intent, but the other half thinks that it might be because they are both shoe companies and their could be value in seeing related products from different brands.

I am leaning toward it not being a relevant ad, but I could see the argument the other way as well.

I think the important point is that if you are selling placement above the first result, trademark squatting means you're actually extorting the trademark holder: Pay up or we'll put a competitor above you. Nobody should have to pay to be the top result for a searcher looking for them directly.

Of course, this problem could alternately be solved by always putting the trademark holder as the top result for the term, and showing relevant ads immediately below. You can still sell to competitors, but nobody feels like they're forced to pay you to own their own name, which is what happens at Google.

Selling the top result is possibly the most problematic thing about Google. And very few nontechnical users can even identify the first organic result. They click the ad thinking it's the top result, not because they found the ad valuable or relevant.

You are right. I understand the temptation from a business perspective, but it is not an ethical practice IMO.

What does the rule look like that enforces that? No ads can be placed that contain the trademark of another company? Would that be too restrictive in practice?

I think it's probably something that'd need to be curated, because the line is probably "I am looking for x, not results about x", sort of like how when your site sees a search for Twitter, it just goes to Twitter. Presumably if I am looking for "Twitter bots", I am not looking for Twitter but products or apps that interact with Twitter and ads are likely to be relevant, not obstructive.

So there should possibly be a way to register specific trademarks as having an authoritative destination that should be the top result, and above any ad placements, but any additional qualifiers in the search term beyond the trademark should exempt this behavior?

What about showing ads from competitors in a sidebar

Then the users can choose themselves if they want to have a look there?

Or two columns: one with, one w/o ads

That would be fine with me. Ultimately if I knew the first listed result when someone searched "mapquest" was mapquest.com and not a malicious ad, I'd switch every senior citizen I know to using that search engine immediately.

I'm working on a similar system. I want to build a business around it, but if you want the Infinite Auction code I can let you use that (only fair, since I nicked the idea from Project Wonderful).

If you're interested in doing something with News hit me up. https://yetigogo.com

thomas.me

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.

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."

Typo too.

Ha, you're telling me! Yeah, taking the site down was directly related to the Hacker News post. It will be temporary though.

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.

You are saying Neeva is getting a lot of press. But, This is the first time I read about that.

What is a federated data source?

Any plans to allow users to blacklist domains? Even post search would be fabulous

What about the tech behind?

Are date filters planned?

Absolutely.

Do you index the web yourself?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com