Rollyo is a great idea. It really is.
But (because you knew there had to be one) it would be a lot more of a good idea if it worked a bit better.
First of all, its search is not very sophisticated. It defaults to ANDs between search terms, which is fine. You do appear to be able to do Boolean searches, not that most people will go for that. However, phrase searching is not possible, which makes it really useless for anything apart from extremely basic searches.
My other beef with it is that I wanted to put in certain sub-sections of a few good kid-friendly reference type sites, things I use in AskNow all the time. Things like the Columbia Encyclopedia, the kid and teen sections of the Internet Public Library, that kind of thing. Perhaps it's my fault for not reading the fine print, which does tell you only to put in top-level domains, but realising that I was not searching specific things came as a bit of a shock. I have since edited my searchroll down to what is technically possible.
I also utterly detest the "sponsored link" results that come in the middle of my search results. At least Google has the sense to sideline them where it's a lot easier to ignore them.
I know Rollyo is in beta. But until they can improve on a Google search, I'm sticking with Google. For all its other faults, Google does allow phrase searching, does allow you to search specific sites or parts of sites (Googling for egypt site:bartleby.com/65 will give you vastly different results to egypt site:bartleby.com, which is effectively all Rollyo will allow you to do) and although you may not be able to search a lot of different sites at the same time due to limitations on number of search terms, it's still a lot more effective.
In fact, it would be a much better idea if Google acquired this in its ever-expanding empire and added the ability to custom create Google Rollyos. You read it here first.
BTW: In the instructions for adding the Rollyo icon to your blog, step #4 is not necessary. You don't need to register your blog to add your searchroll to your blog.
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2 comments:
Thanks to the instruction comments...I'll amend
This is a thanks to you, Marian Paroo, for helpful advice with photograph transfer. Us dogs being straightdown-the-line, uncomplicated creatures, it's the way we like our instructions too - and yours were. I'm takin' ma time in the bloggin' business while you are surgin' ahead - great stuff! Anyway, thanks - and the fishy things are in the mail.
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