Library clips

Rollyo is a basic tool that lets you roll your own mini search engine made up of a maximum of 25 sites…the results are powered by Yahoo!.

This tool is going to hit the roof, I can see Yahoo! buying this company in a snap
…this is going to be loved by all, just the sound of making your own topic search engine is exciting.
I can see not just personal applications, but for education, news, enterprise, government, for anyone who searches the same regular sites

…see a great explanation at the SEW blog.

Ever since Gigablast had a go at this idea I forgot about it, now in the web 2.0 environment this type of tool seems so much better…add more user functionality, sharing, presentation and people want to know what it’s about. I think if most new web tools are able to add a community feel to them, they’ll have much more take up, as the web 2.0 folks are all about read/write/share/intergrate/manipulate, etc…

I once thought Furl was the answer but this only searches full-text of web pages, not the whole site.

Anyway as mentioned Gigablast allows a user to build a mini search engine from up to 200 sites (actually now it is 500), and offers a search box to put on your blog or website, and the search mechanism is powered by Gigablast…that’s about it.

They also have a similar tool, for site searching one URL, just like Google’s sitesearch box
…you can do this with Rollyo anyway by only including one URL in a Searchroll.

As the SEW blog mentioned you could get the same functionality of doing a meta site search by using the “site”, and “|” operator to separate sites in Google…but how cumbersome is this, Rollyo has made a web 2.0 application around this simple notion of searching several sites in one go.

Here’s how it works

From the home page click the “Explore Searchrolls” link

In the body you can see a summary of links to search rolls sorted in different ways

Along the side are some featured Searchroll boxes

…if you click on the up/down arrow it displays the URL’s included in that Searchroll

…in one click you can also add that search roll to your account

…you can click on the owner to see their account

You can also search for Searchrolls (not sure what fields this searches, as some results come up that are not in the title or url, maybe it searches for tags as well - these are applied when you make a Searchroll)

Here is a look at my account.

Here you can see:

- my details
- manage feature
- my list of Searchrolls I have made
- my list of Searchrolls I have saved (save your own, or discover other search rolls to save)
- my recent searches
- a showcase of some Searchrolls

Once you have added a few Searchrolls to your account, you can go to the search box on the home page (or any page) and choose one of your added Searchrolls from a drop-down menu, you can also just choose to search the web (Yahoo!)

So let’s search a Searchroll, here’s a search for the term “folksonomy” in one of mine called Library clips - Blogroll (my favourite 25 blogs)

Above the line is the latest Searchroll News (what is this, maybe it’s from Yahoo! News)

Below the line are the results from my search.

You can also limit the search to one of the sites in your Searchroll, by just clicking on the source, here I’ve limited my “folksonomy” search to just the Research Buzz URL.

More

Able to use Yahoo! search syntax such as intitle:searchterm

Email form to share a Searchroll

Private/Public Searchrolls

Expand your results to the whole web (Yahoo!)

Lots of tools coming soon, like putting a search box on your site

See the about page or FAQ for more.

Keep up-to-date with their blog, coming soon.

Wishlist

It just became beta today, but I’ll slog them with some features I’d like to see:

- What about a Rollyo toolbar so you can access your favourite mini-search engines from your browser

- Searching just within a sub-domain
(this way you could limit the search to just within a blog category…or even limit the search to a section of Google News)

- At the moment you can only explore items from the explore page, but when you create your own Searchroll you choose a system based category, and can apply multiple user-defined tags
…I guess that means that this will soon be a folksonomy like del.icio.us.

Now if you can apply tags to a Searchroll for findability, once you add this to your account will you be able to give it your own tags.

- Option of adding an RSS URL, but then again what for, as searching in the RSS version of a site might not search the whole sight, these are the limitations of RSS searching.
Although this could extend the number of sources as you could splice several feeds into one mega-feed and that would be counted as one of the 25 sources.

- It would be easier to bulk load some URL’s, kind of OPML style

- Once you do a search within a Searchroll, you can limit that search to only one site, it would be good if you could check multiple sites to limit your search (at the moment it’s one or all)

Kind of a related post:
Syndicated searching: A9 OpenSearch