Runaroo.com makes the following claim:

“The Runnaroo search engine was designed from the ground up to protect the privacy of its users.”

So I poked around and this is what I found:

poor transparency

• They don’t say who they are
• They don’t say where they are
• They make no mention of GDPR
• They don’t say who their advertising partners are

Runaroo feeds privacy abusers

• They source data from Google and Yelp (possibly Bing too*)
• They use Google’s cloud service (that’s according to my ASN check, yet the Cloud Firewall FF plugin flags it as AWS, which would be even worse)
• The first four results of an arbitrary search were privacy-abusing Tor-hostile CloudFlare sites. Each result consumes enough screen space for four results to consume the whole screen of some users. So essentially filling the screen with CF links.

They must be paying Google for cloud service, and they’re very likely paying both Google and Yelp for API access. Financially feeding privacy abusers is a non-starter.

An amusing side-effect of their meta-search is that if “Runnaroo” is in the search query, the results want to correct it. I was asked “Did you mean bonnaroo bing?” when I searched for “Runnaroo Bing”. The reason for that search was to try to confirm a rumor that Runnaroo also sources from Bing.

(*) I have in my notes that Runnaroo sources from MS Bing, but I lost track of where I got that information so I don’t know if it’s true. If anyone knows plz say something.

Features (paywall flags)

One cool and novel feature of Runnaroo is that they flag paywalls. E.g. next to Washington Post hits, it says “content may be behind a paywall”.

Anti-features

They lack links to cached or proxied versions of websites.

Conclusion: Ss is still king

They’re not as bad as DuckDuckGo, but Ss is still the most privacy-respecting search engine in the world.