Rollyo

Today's "Thing" exercise was to create your own

Rollyo "federated" search.

It is not clear about the reference of Rollyo as a "roll your own" tool being related to:
tobacco cigarettes ?
or
spliff, doobie, joint, ace, blunt, or pinhead ?
or
sushi ?

But the idea is a good one.

It wasn't very difficult to set this up at all.

I enjoyed the process of choosing my favorite websites and adding them to a list so that they could be search together.

Adding the widget to my Favorites/Links Bar was an interesting - {but it stops working if I clear my Cookies}

Adding the Widget to my Blog worked very well....
Look to the lower Right corner of my Blog

The Downside:

Unfortunately, the searches start at the "domain" level and can't specify a sub-directory.

This doesn't work well for my intended purposes. Often I find sites of Online Books. Each of them has a sub-directory for a specific Author. -- But the Rollyo search engine can't be directed to only the sub-directory of that author.

The result is that all of the authors end up in the search.

This make the searching less than ideal.

--- Thus making my "G K Chesterton" search into "GKC and Friends"


Also it is a little slow.

Additionally - with only a few specified sites one would miss the serendipity that an engine like Google could help with.

In short - The federated aspect of this product is not comprehensive enough to replace Google - nor is it precise enough to replace Google.

I would much rather use the Cluster by URL feature of Clusty - to distinguish specific websites.

This offers the same multi site searching that Google does - along with a visual Clustering of the Keywords or the Key Websites that the results were found in.

I'll play with Rollyo a little more to see how it goes - but for the long term I'll probably stick with Clusty

With Clusty I Made this Cloud for my Blog

Loading Clusty Cloud ...