In another lifetime — i.e. a few years ago — I used to run a small search engine. Rather than try to index every possible site in the world, this search engine used some pretty basic technology to index the then-handful of web sites on the Internet opposed to the animal rights agenda. It was fairly rudimentary, but it was also very cool just to search this particular slice of the web that was relevant to me and others following the animal rights movement.
I’ve always had a goal in the back of my head of bringing that back someday, but Rollyo.Com has created something much better — an easy-to-use system to create a front end to Yahoo!’s search engine to search a limited number of sites.
For example, here’s an anti-animal rights search engine front-end that I created using Rollyo. Search on any term there, and the results come back only from the 7 or 8 anti-AR sites I’ve added. The user can currently add up to 25 sites.
This is extremely useful and I’m surprised its taken so long for such an application to emerge. And as much as I like Rollyo.Com, I’m hoping that Google comes up with something like it as I find their results more useful than Yahoo!’s.
Rollyo.Com is currently in beta and some of the functionality isn’t complete — what I’d really like to be able to do is throw a search box on my web site that searches the entities I’ve created, but that’s still a “coming soon” feature.
Still, even in its infancy this is an awesome tool.