Rolling On and On and On…

Rollyo took some warming up to. Perhaps my topics were too obscure when I tried out the search rolls for e-Books, rare books, photos and quotes from Thing 28. Ironically, most of the photos in Free Photos were from Flickr (I had already created a Flickr account!), so I didn’t find this search roll too useful. I was able to find some interesting quotes in Quick Quote, but the book searches were dissatisfying.

This search tool didn’t thrill me at first, because I had to create yet another profile. Again. I had originally planned to do option 2 where I just checked Rollyo out, but I didn’t find the experience particularly enlightening. So I gritted my teeth and registered for a Rollyo account.

It took me awhile to get the hang of how Rollyo worked. For instance, the searchrolls showed up as a dropdown menu on the top of the screen instead of a new window even when you’re at the bottom of the screen. It was easy enough to create my own searchrolls: I clicked on the tab, chose a title for it, and typed in the URLs. I could have also copied searchrolls from other Rollyo users, but I wanted to create my own searchrolls with websites I’m familiar with. I ran into a little trouble, because I wanted to link back to Rollyo account in the blog, but I found out that I had to make my searchrolls public for anyone to use it. I thought my searchrolls must be simplistic compared to other users’ searchrolls. However, when I searched through some of the searchrolls similar to mine, I was pleasantly surprised to find that mine were comparable, having more websites than some, less than others.

Rollyo wasn’t too exciting until I tried to use them for searches. When I entered a topic in one of my newly created searchrolls, it pulled up results from all the websites I selected. I was thrilled by the ease of searching multiple websites with one search. Rollyo feels like a combination of Google and Del.icio.us, with a search engine searching through sites I’ve added to a list as I did with Del.icio.us. At the worst, if your searchrolls yield no result, you can have Rollyo expand your search to the Web as well.