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.

My notes on each company are below. Many of these have been profiled here before, and we hope to get full profiles of the rest up as soon as we can schedule interviews with the teams (if you’d like to talk to me, I’m the guy with a huge TechCrunch sticker on my laptop) (Jeff Clavier also has a TechCrunch sticker on his laptop, but I’m not French, so you’ll know its not me ).

I’m breaking this down into two posts to keep it manageable. Here’s Part 1. Part 2 is here.

Social Text

Ross Mayfield spoke about wikiwyg, the first wysiwyg editor for wikis. He says its much more than a tool for wikis, however. It’s and “open source synchronous editor for the web” and his vision is that it will be used on many web applications beyond wikis. Want to try out Social Text for free? Mention web2con at socialtext and get a free five-user wiki for a year.

Rollyo

Dave Pell presented Rollyo, the roll-your-own search engine (profile).

You can create a mini-search engine from only those sites you trust or feel have relevant content, and then search against that personal search. He used a travel search example that was quite compelling – searching against just fodors, travelpost and frommers. Saved searches can be private, or public and shared with others.

Joyent

David Young talked about Joyent, a compelling network suite for small groups and companies that includes mail, calendar, contacts, files, etc., and allows developers to mash up systems on their data. Lots of tagging and “smart filters”. Open APIs to allow third party apps. Take the tour here.

bunchball

Rajat Paharia showed off his super-cool flash platform BunchBall. Rajat was also nice enough to give me a personal presentation earlier in the day. Rajat talked about how developers need both infrastructure and distribution to get applications out. BunchBall provides both – a slick flash platform (Flash 8 is required for some applications) along with open APIs, and new third party applications are automatically distributed accross the platform.

Current applications include a number of games and photo-sharing. Rajar also says that Metaliq is creating a multi user texas holdem game, to be released soon.

Check this one out. And contrary to rumors, Rajat did NOT beat me at tic-tac-toe while giving me the demo. He lies.

RealTravel

Ken Leeder talked about his new company, RealTravel. It’s centralized user content with some really sweet tagging and search/find capabilities .

The idea is to leverage user content and social networking to create a personalized experience for travel shoppers and a more effective venue for travel industry marketeres. THus, hopefully, breaking the death spiral that the online travel industry is now in: a race to the lowest price.

Zimbra

Satish Dharmara gave an absolutely stellar presentation of Zimbra (profile), although to be honest Zimbra is so damn cool and full of AJax awesomeness that he could have stood there and babbled and the audience would still have cheered.

Zimbra is an “open source enterprise-scalable collaboration server with intelligent online backup and single mailbox restore. It has hierarchical storage management”. What does this mean? You can’t run it from the Zimbra website, but you can install it on your own server. It’s Outlook as it’s supposed to be.

Read our profile. It (Zimbra, not our profile) rocks. Demo here.

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

Note: Due to a misunderstanding, I posted a profile of Rollyo while the company was in private beta and did not want any publicity (the misunderstanding was that I didn’t know this when I posted). They have requested that I remove the post for now, and I am complying. Nothing heavy, I just received a very polite email request from a very smart employee of the company. In my opinion, all this controversy just adds more buzz and is ultimately good for the company. And I also understand that Rollyo would like to keep things a little quiet for now as they work through the beta. I look forward to re-posting when the time is right. In the meantime, I’m going to keep testing the site. Good things are going on over there. Check it out (by requesting a beta invite).