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by slaughtr 1903 days ago
After 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

1 comments

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.

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.