Rollyo is a simple way to “roll your own search engine”. You can get started by choosing a few pre-defined categories – these contain a list of URLs that you can add to.
It gets a bit more interesting though if you add your own URLs though. From the homepage, click “Create Searchroll” and you can build a custom search engine.
Hold On, Let’s Do This Properly
If you actually want to create a searchroll, it’s probably a good idea to register. You can try it out without registering, but it’s easier to find your searchroll in future if you have an account.
Incidentally, Rollyo should implement social logins so you don’t have to create a unique account for the site. Anyway…
Expose All Your Sites
I have a lot of blogs. FriendFeed is a great way to aggregate the posts and share them automatically. However, it’s not much good if you aren’t online when a new post goes up.
This is where Rollyo comes in. I can set up a custom search engine for all of my blogs, which means you can search the content across each site very easily.
As I said… I have a lot of blogs.
Let’s See How it Works
If you now go back to the Rollyo homepage, you should see your new search engine in the list of available options.
I’ve decided to search for “blogging”. I talk about blogging a lot, so that’ll undoubtedly bring up a few posts.
Sure enough, it does. Not bad.
There’s a link on the right-hand side of the results page – “Link to Searchroll”. Here’s my Searchroll, if you’d like to give it a try.
More Cool Tools
In the Tools section, there are a few more things you can do. Adding a searchbox to your site is a fairly standard feature. A nice inclusion is the option to add your searchroll to Firefox as a search provider. Unfortunately, I use Chrome. Oh well!
A Little Feedback…
Rollyo says it’s powered by Yahoo Search. However, Yahoo is powered by Bing. So is Rollyo powered by Bing also?
Rollyo does seem to return good results, and handles three letter searches well (a problem with some home-grown search engines).
Rollyo only allows 25 links per searchroll. It would be nice to see more.
It would be good if you could bookmark a search as an RSS feed, and pull it into Yahoo Pipes. Now that would be cool.
