Rollyo: Create Your Own Personalized Search Engine and Share it with Others

Do you get tired of trying to search for something on Yahoo or Google only to come up with so many web sites more dedicated to selling you a product than with providing you information? Of course, you do. Silly question. Wouldn't you love to be able to search just the top twenty or so sites you know you can trust to give you what you need without having to go through the trouble of filtering them somehow?

I came across this thing on Firefox called Rollyo, which basically lets you create your own customized search engine of up to 25 of your favorite web sites. Not only can you customize your own search engine, but you can even give it a unique name, and not only that, but you can share it with other users as well as using their Rollyo search engines! Do you enjoy Will & Grace? Then check out the Rollyo search engine chock full of online shopping sites supposedly created by star Debra Messing. Or, if politics is your thing, check out Arianna Huffington's Rollyo search engine staffed with blogs. Or check out Lord Love a Search Engine, my own personal individualized Rollyo search engine.

If you have the Firefox browser, you can add Rollyo up there to your list of search engines. The first web site I added to my search roll was Associated Content, of course, which also makes it a terrific tool for content producers to get their stuff out there. The more people who make their own Rollyo search engine with Associated Content on it, the more people who can share their search engine. The more people who are using those shared search engines, the more traffic to this site. And so and so forth. In addition, as part of the sharing process you can also actually email your search roll to someone.

Take advantage of the sharing process from the other end as well. You can go to Rollyo's web site and do a search on the type of specialized search engine you are looking for. Let's say, for instance, you're writing an article or doing research on a health-related topic, but you can't just can't seem to get to a site that has the stuff you're looking for. Do a search for a search roll on "health" and you'll be presented with a number of customized search engines focusing on that topic. Each of those will in turn will have up to twenty-five sites that you can look through. Admittedly, many will have duplicates, but you just may find some nugget of a site that somebody with more patience than you came across on page 1,367 of a Google search. Let's face facts: The most information-dense pages do not always rank at the top of Google or Yahoo. So very often you miss out on a great page buried somewhere deep within that huge stack of information. You may just luck across somebody who found that great page.

For content producers, there's an added tool. Rollyo also offers a link you can click on that will bring up the most recent searches conducted on Rollyo engines. Of course, this has its downside as well. If you use your own Rollyo search engine to do a lot of searches for words you don't want people to know you've been searching on, I would suggest you don't use your own and instead use someone else's. As an example, as I write this article, the most popular searches conducted on Rollyo search engines appear all seem to have either words "porn" or "sex" in them. On the other hand, you might want to write something about Dave Chappelle's Block Party" because apparently it's quite popular.

Of course, you don't have to stop with one Rollyo search engine. If, for instance, you do a lot of internet research and you want to create a series of Rollyo engines that are narrowed down more specifically, then you could do that. You could have one customized search engine that goes through your favorite movie sites and one that goes through your favorite political sites, etc.

Rollyo looks to be the future of search engines. No doubt there will be new and exciting ways to make custom searches easier in the future, but for now Rollyo is meeting my needs and it does seem to carry promise as a potential tool for advertising Associated Content.