Monday, September 10, 2007

Rollyo-create your own search engine

I don't think we'll be offering Google any serious competition any time soon with this tool. After spending a frustrating amount of time trying to create a searchroll by importing some of my bookmarks (as opposed to manually entering up to 25 urls in a tiny scroll box window), I revisited the site today, armed with a list of ready reference sites, courtesy of a PubLib subscriber. I cut and pasted the urls into the tiny box and ran a search for "US Presidents list" hoping to score a list of US Presidents- I got 2,040 hits, 20 per page, but the relevance was low- lots of citations for "list" "President's" etc. One of the top 5 results was this: "a speech by Michael Heyman, the President of the Smithsonian at the time, in ... If you need a refresher in HTML, visit my list of helpful sites. ..."

I am sure there is a specialized use for this- if for instance you know exactly which haystack contains the needle you're looking for, and you need to keep finding it, but I was not very impressed.

My searchroll is public and is titled "Ready Reference", that is, provided it persists upon logout: the site is unclear as to what is actually saved- it says I have no saved searchrolls, but it lists Ready Reference in my profile.

Oh, yes- and lots of sponsored links and ads, although no weird pop-up junk.

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