Weekly Site Review | Rollyo

If you're looking for an entry about Rolo's, "the candy with the chewy caramels in milk chocolate", you should turn back now. No, this week I'm here to talk about Rollyo - a search engine that takes a bit of a different approach to navigating the web. The concept is an interesting one and is definitely worth spending some time with. So if you're feeling a little adventurous, read on to learn more!

Rollyo boasts that enables you to "roll your own" search engine (hence the name) into what is called a "Searchroll". If you've ever waded through seemingly endless and irrelevant search results, Rollyo feels your pain. They have made it easy for anyone to narrow the scope of their searches to take place within web sites that they already know and trust. It's also simple to quickly edit your Searchroll or to create more whenever you want to. But it gets even better than that.

Creating and searching with your own Searchrolls is only the tip of the iceberg with Rollyo. The next most important feature is that you can easily share your Searchrolls with the rest of the Rollyo community. And everyone can edit everyone else's Searchrolls and adopt them into their own stable of personalized niche search engines. This is an integral part of the overall experience, because it allows people who are (ideally) educated on a particular topic to easily refine their strategies to achieve the most relevant results. In short, it's like the Wikipedia of search. If one or more of your Searchrolls becomes popular within the Rollyo community, you can even become a "High Roller".

There are lots of extras that come along with Rollyo. You can add your personalized Searchrolls to your browser and to your web site. You can tell Rollyo to import your browser's bookmarks and add them to your Searchroll as a list of sites to search within. Their bookmarklet gets the job done too. I couldn't find anything on their web site that indicated a limit as to how many Searchrolls one can keep around.

There are a few things that are holding Rollyo back from greatness, though. Only 25 different web sites can be included in a Searchroll, when the ability to get more comprehensive would likely pay off when doing some intensive research. Yahoo powers the non-RSS results (Feedster does those), when Google would arguably do a better job simply because it has crawled more pages of more web sites. And while Rollyo does make it easy for anyone to narrow in on search results, power users who know all of Google's advanced search operators probably wouldn't benefit from this service. The most significant caveat with Rollyo, however, is that we don't always just want to stay within our comfort zone. Many times we search to find new sources altogether, even if does mean taking the time to sift through the online garbage.

ABOVE: The logo reminds me of Fruit by the Foot.

Overall, I'm impressed with Rollyo and I think you will be too. Apparently they've recently redesigned the interface and it's been in beta for quite some time, so we may be seeing some even more interesting developments in the near future. Aside from checking the Searchrolls of others, Rollyo may not be the best tool for expanding your horizons "“ but it's a viable way to speed up your daily search tasks and to check out how other people are searching for a specific topic.