Company: Overview
Rollyo, which launched today, allows you to create and publish your own search engines, based on websites you decide to include. John Battelle and Steve Rubel wrote about Rollyo earlier today as well.
The basic idea? Create customized searches (built on Yahoo search) that include only those sites you want to include. Search those sites for information that you know you can trust. And, see what other’s have created, and leverage those searches as well.
To set up (or “roll”) a search, you are asked to name up to 20 websites, pick a category and tag the search. A search can be public or private – public searches are ranked by popularity and listed on the site. You can also share searches with others directly.
Once you search, you can also expand the search out to all websites to get additional results.
In their About section, Rollyo says:
Rollyo is the fast, easy way to create personal search engines using only the sources you trust.
Are you tired of wading though thousands of irrelevant search results to get to the information you want? Ever wish you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust? With Rollyo, you can easily create your own custom search engines, and explore and save those created by others.WHY ROLLYO?
Rollyo puts the power of Yahoo! Search in your hands, by giving you the tools to create your own personal search engines – with no programming required. All you have to do is pick the sites you want to search, and we’ll create a custom search engine for you.
Team
Dave Pell, Founder + Roll Player
Angus Durocher, Engineering + Roll Model
Dan Cederholm, Designer + CSS Jedi
Alex Wright, Zen Master User Experience Architect
Saw Arianna Huffington, Debra Messing and Rosario Dawson on the site. So does this mean that 1) they are internet search geeks, 2) are buddies with Dave Pell, or of those involved or 3) were made up by someone else?
Arianna/Debra/Rosario – cool, two degrees of separation. Maybe I can get them on Friendster next.
Looks good… I’d wish it were powered by a better search engine though…
Singpolyma, exactly what I thought.
1. Add 5 URLs to your “roll” on ROLLYO and search for something.
2. Add same 5 URLs to a Google search with the “site:” command
3. Be amazed by the difference.
what’s their business model?
Dave Pell,
Ok, you got some people to write you up, I understand that’s PR game. You got Adriana and Rosario (celebrities) grill on your site endorsing their own stuff. So, what do you want me to do as a consumer with your site?
//Rollyo puts the power of Yahoo! Search in your hands//
Do Yahoo! really need Rollyo to do that when they have 360?
This relies on Yahoo! of course, rather than sites’ own search engines… I’d be keener to see new interfaces to OpenSearch searchrolls where i can build meta-search engines out of site specific search engines…
I found a secondary use for Rollyo that I thought you might find interesting.
Blog entry – “Rollyo – Searchengine Taste Test #2″
http://digability.blogspot.com
Same concept, sans Yahoo! search, powered by proprietary index and crawler:
http://www.metamojo.com
Check it out and enjoy
Check it out and enjoy