Rollyo is an online tool that lets you create your personal search engine quickly and easily.

I tried it out and it is easy. It took about seven minutes and was actually a lot of fun. Rollyo has a delightful design, a simple and uncluttered user interface and a great service.

How it works

Of course you do not actually make a search engine. What you do is make a list of sites on a specific topic, sites that you like and trust. Rollyo then uses Yahoo! search technology to create a searchroll that searches all these sites in one easy search.

A searchroll can include up to 25 web sites. And Rollyo is a free service, so you can make as many searchrolls as you like and need.
This is a great tool for anyone who has a special interest or hobby, but it will certainly also be popular with researchers, reporters and others who spend long hours online.

Some examples

My searchroll is comprised of the sites I usually visit researching stories for Pandia Search Engine News. I have collected 17 great sites including the search engines’ own blogs and some industry experts.

You can choose to make your searchroll public. Because many searchrolls are public, you can explore and save searchrolls created by others. If you are interested in the search engine industry, you might want to take a look at the searchrolls of John Battelle and Gary Price.

Rollyo tools

A really neat feature that works like a charm is a tool that lets you add your own or any of your saved search rolls to your Firefox search box.

Another tool lets you import your bookmarks to Rollyo and make searchrolls from them.

Rollyo also promises to have a tool ready soon that will let you add a Rollyo search box to your web site.

Rollyo searchrolls are tagged and this makes it easy to search the public searchrolls. Enjoy!

PS: Here at Pandia we have already had a kind of searchroll for a while, our Search Engine Search Engine, which you can find at the Pandia Search Engine Detective page along with many other useful tools.