Rollyo has arrived in beta, courtesy of Dave Pell, taking the Yahoo search API and allows users to customize their own search engine without any programmning by customizing a list of up to 30 different sources. I registed, uploaded a profile photo and quickly rolled a Tech Hmm mashup containing a dozen or so tech-oriented websites, including Hmm.

Rollyo is easy to use and has an attractive site design, save for the javascript popups for the links to the custom searchrolls. Looks and reacts good in IE, Firefox and Opera. I didn’t try it in Safari.

The concept is promising but it is hampered by the limitations of wizard behind the curtain: the backend search, namely Yahoo. Yahoo search doesn’t return the results as relevantly as Google, sorry. I wish there was a Rollyo that used Google, now that would be handy. Unfortunately Google hasn’t opened up APIs like Yahoo has done. Maybe they will someday and we can have a Google-powered Rollyo.

Just try to search for anything from this blog using the Tech Hmm Rollyo I created. I couldn’t, good luck. That’s not a very effective search engine when you put in enough keywords to find something specific and can’t even find it among a select list of sources. That’s not Rollyo’s fault, they are just plugging in through an API to the underlying engine which is Yahoo. Those who think Yahoo’s search is superior to Google or MSN should love Rollyo.

Nick from Threadwatch calls Rollyo “kind of useful.”

I noticed a few people had trouble locating a link to their search roll, so that probably should be on the: Make This Easier List.

There are also a number of “coming soon” placeholder messages in the tools section. This was just made public today, so it’s good to see that these helper tools are on the roadmap in the future.

Perhaps the most interesting side feature of this service is being able to view the source lists by others grouped and tagged. That information might be more valuable than the actual search results from the respective searchrolls.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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