Rollyo have released a workable form of their search tool. I found it first looking for a custom search engine and their tool is one step in the right direction. It’s really only good for having a search between grouped sites, or between friends (with a limit of 25 sites per rollyo group) – but it’s a bit of fun. Here’s mine:
I’m hoping Rollyo (or someone else) can come up with a tool to let me load up a thousand or more sites (easily) and have a truly custom search engine focussed on a particular subject with “trusted” sites. It’s all very well having search on a directory such as RealState but it’s still only searching the content submitted to the directory – not the content on the sites in the directory.
Link2Blogs
While I’m experimenting with site add ons, here’s an interesting concept: A tower of blog links…
This isn’t so unique, it’s been done with other blogging tools, and I use Link Vault too, but this is a Javascript list so it’s not sapping your site (or adding to it ;)) from a search engine perspective.
You have to think, that over the next year, a good number of these sites will disappear without trace. I remember when I launched my very first website and there were all sorts of gimmicks to boost search engine visibility. Maybe they still exist in newbie land, but serious webmasters don’t use them. It’ll be interesting to see which of these tools have the staying power.
Would this search utility really be practical over Google?
It’s different, because you control the sites are used to generate the results. So I can ensure that you aren’t searching my competitor. If the site is an authority site then the user can assume that the sites in the Rollyo search are also authority sites and they’ll get a better quality search.
In my example one of the options is “Tech Forums” and I’ve included my favourite forums so you know that the results will come from quality forum sources. Because I’ve got DP in there the possible results are huge.
But with only 25 sites in the search Rollyo is delivering a snapshot of the web and not a niche search engine.