Rollyo was a Yahoo!-powered search engine
which allowed users to register accounts and create search engines that only
retrieve results from the websites and blogs they want to include in their
search results.
Users could also share their
"rolled" engines with other contributors, also HTML was available to
post a mini search box to a user's website.
Rollyo was founded by Dave Pell, built by
Angus Durocher, and designed by Dan Cederholm. A private Beta was launched in
August 2005 and the final product was released in September of the same year.
Strengths
Even folksonomy enthusiasts will be happy
since it's possible to "tag" your Searchrolls for better retrieval.
All rolls can be marked public so they can be seen by all Rollyo users.
Weaknesses
The ability to be able to limit your search
to a specific part of a web domain. For example, Rollyo searches entire sites
such as www.cnn.com or support.apple.com, but not parts of sites, such as
www.cnn.com/politics/. The ability to limit to parts of sites would make Rollyo
MUCH more powerful. In some cases, it would also be useful to be able to enter
only a specific page into a SearchRoll.
The chance to use other databases (verticals)
alongh with the Yahoo web database. Remember, if the page hasn't been crawled
by Yahoo, Rollyo will not find it.
