If you follow this blog you know that I rarely write about metasearch engines. It’s not that I dislike them, there’s just too many of them out there, it would be hard to keep track of them all, and few capture my attention. Plus, even though metasearch engines are federated search applications in their own right — they aggregate search results in real time from a number of sources (which may consist of live or crawled and indexed content) — I mentally place them in a category of their own.

Last December I wrote about Rollyo, a personal search engine that you can customize with a list of URLs to search. While one could argue that Rollyo is not a federated search application (it’s got to be searching crawled and indexed content rather than live sources if it searches arbitrary web-sites) I found it to be innovative enough to warrant a post. Addict-o-matic (hat tip to Web Worker Daily) is another metasearch engine that intrigued me.

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Samuel Dean has in his blog, Web Worker Daily, a post titled Need a Better Search Engine? Roll Your Own. He’s writing about a new web-site, Rollyo. Rollyo allows you to roll your own search engine, which they call a searchroll. The site defines a searchroll as:

“… a collection of the sites you trust and find useful. It’s a personal search engine you create to provide relevant results from a hand selected list of reliable sites.”

Dean’s blog post shares a little bit of his experience with Rollyo.

Rollyo lacks the ability to fill out search forms and search sources live so it’s not a federated search engine but it might be useful as a tool for aggregating some crawled and indexed content and using it as a source for a federated search engine.

I’ll have to review the site and report back on its pros and cons, and compare Rollyo to Google Custom Search Engine and to IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition .

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