Create your own Search Engine with ROLLYO

  • October 5, 2006

  • By Kaly

Rollyo is an intresting service that lets users create personal search engines. Site provides easy to use tools that can be used to create customized search engine in a matter of seconds. The idea is to create search engine which will search for information only on the websites selected by user.

To create personal engine all you need to do is to add websites that will be used for search. You can create search engines which will for instance look for information only on the websites you trust. It is also quite handy tool for creating topic specific search engines(ex; jobs,football, metal music). By specifying right resources you can produce search tool which will return fewer but far more relevant search results than major search engines like Google or Yahoo.

Rollyo is getting popular and many people use it’s service to create custom engines. Here you may find bunch of cool search engines created by rollyo community. Rollyo calls these user-created engines searchrolls. You can save and personalize these searchrolls according to your needs. Once you produce some searchrolls you can decide whether to share them with rollyo community or not. Currently, there are about 150.000 different searchscrolls created by members. This service is completely free and no registration required for using most of the available tools. You may only need to register if you want to create your own rollyo profile.

In addition, Rollyo offers RollBar Bookmarklet, a browser tool that lets you conduct a local search on whatever site currently opened in the browser. This is especially useful, if site has no search option of it’s own.

And as always, lucky Firefox(firefox profile) users can create custom Searchrolls and add them to the browser. These searchrolls can have a topical list of upto 25 websites that will be used as a search source.

Overall, I think this is quite useful service, which is easy to operate and 100% free. You can check out list of all available tools offered by rollyo here. ok, time to roll…

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Kaly

A father of two, neo geek, tech-obsessed male who runs the MakeUseOf Directory. He is also the co-founder of MakeUseOf and been here since makeuseof went live.

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  • Lex

    can this be set to search in documents such as .doc and .xls which are located in the user’s(me) hard drive? For example i’ll type a name and it will check the .doc files to see which .doc files that name is in.

  • Pax

    Exactly what I was looking for! Thanks, Kaly!

    I had been wanting to consolidate my favorite sites into specific categories and search only these sites (customized databases). In fact, I thought this was such a good idea, I even wrote Google about implementing exactly this about a month ago (no answer, of course).

    I figured someone had to have already done something like this but couldn’t find anything until I came across this article.

    I’ve been creating customized DBs (Searchscrolls) on the site for a bit to start testing. Sadly… I keep running into connection errors. Rollyo is on either low-end servers or are being overwhelmed by traffic – I dunno…

    I keep getting pages stating “MySQL connection errors”, “too many connections”… The site is frustratingly slow.

    Hope they get the backend issues fixed because this is exactly what I’ve been looking for.