Rollyo, a San Francisco based startup that launched in September 2005, released a bevy of new features on their site tonight. I won’t go into detail on all of them, but a complete list is available on their About page.
If you aren’t familiar with Rollyo, it allows users to “roll their own search engines” by telling Rollyo the sites they’d like to include in the search engine. Up to 25 sites can be included. Rollyo then leverges the Yahoo search API (and now Feedster as well) and limits search results to just those sites.
Rollyo also allows users to search pre-defined topical search engines.
The new features include a slight redesign, allowing users to clone and modify any other search engine (there are about 150,000 user-generated search engines available), and other changes. Also, you no longer need to register to use most features of the site (include search engine creation and use of the bookmarklet, discussed below).
They’ve also created a new search tool, called the Rollbar Bookmarklet, that can be added to the browser and allow users to do a search on whatever site is open in the browser currently. Many sites do not have a search function – the Rollbar is a very useful way of searching sites. This is a very cool and permanent addition to my browser.
Rollyo also has the right attitude about being a startup in the new web. The founder, Dave Pell, is a well known angel investor in Silicon Valley and could easily raise money for the company. But instead of looking for a large venture round of financing, he’s self funded Rollyo and has only one full time employee. By keeping the burn rate super-low, Rollyo can stay the course.
I’ve been using rollyo since PopSci featured it about a year or so ago.
Rollyo is getting better. But Popsci.com? I read it. I’m almost positive they switched to Eurekster this year for their search because Eurekster actually monetizes and increases page views for big publishers like that. Chris Pirillo switched too i think. I just have trouble thinking that people use eachothers personal search engines, hence page rank goes down. I talk to VCs all the time and the problem is Rollyo’s search engines aren’t indexed well by Google because each one has so few searches…so quantity doesn’t mean quality.
Rollyo is well, but I prefer the module Blogbar (blogbar.org), it is for me and my visitors more useful. IMHO
It is nice to see that they are working so hard on adding new features. Some of the new additions are really nice.
So happy to hear that they were able to self-fund this and keep costs way down. I am pretty sure that 90% of all consumer facing web ideas can be built, developed and marketed for about $50-75 grand.
I’ve been using Rollyo for about 6 months on my blog, it is definatly an asset to the viewers of it, considering there are about 6,000 total posts.
PopSci is definitely using Eurekster. I’ve heard that they’ll be releasing the long-promised monetization system for their free Swickis this month, too, so the rest of us can get in on the game.
These are welcome additions, but honestly I still think http://www.atiki.com is far better.
At least, they’ve got a greasemonkey extension to collect feeds “on the fly”, and you can easily filter these feeds using the search feature.
Standard web search is soooo 1.0
Come on Rollyo, when are you going to use rss as they do at atiki.com ?
Personalized web tools that require more than a single click for user set-up and ongoing management I believe will never reach any critical mass. What’s so 2.0 about this outside of the Bookmarklet?
Dave Pell and team have done a great job with the new release. Just a note on the backend: Rollyo is powered by the Yahoo! Web Search API. As Rollyo says in their FAQ: “Yahoo provides the engine and Rollyo puts you behind the steering wheel.”
Anyone else can give the Web Search API a spin here: http://develope.../webSearch.html
Come on all, these are actually all great tools. As Dave mentioned at UTR a few months back, driving people to use these widgets and tools (anything other than Google is improvement) for more efficient search is major progress in the internet search sector. I believe Dave is doing a great job hitting up the personalized side to this market. Eurekster is tackling the community/social side. It’s all good.
Mortimer – and yes, we are launching monetization on the swickis this month.
ajax popup search from the RollBar. simply stunning. I love it. thanks for the tip MA.
It’s interesting that Rollyo lets you import bookmarks from your browser and use the domains of the sites listed there in your own search rolls, but I wonder why they donlt take it further?
SOme time ago I wrote a tool that lets you use a delicious feed as the bassis for a domain or page based search, again using Yahoo as rollyo does.
The working demo is at
http:/blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/deliSearch.html
tony
I started using Rollyo a couple of months ago and I love it. This new update only makes it better. Keep up the good work!
http://smart-ma...es.blogspot.com
“But instead of looking for a large venture round of financing, he’s self funded Rollyo and has only one full time employee. By keeping the burn rate super-low, Rollyo can stay the course.”
A many of my own heart!!! Awesome!
Kevin
Google really sucks…they copy other comapnies ideas and squash their businesses….Google is EVIL……dont drink the koolaid…they are not the cute little innocent harmless startup that their million dollar PT team and product placements makes them out to be…dont drink the googlaid
cool!!!!!!!!!!!!