Rollyo
You may be interested in doing web search the Rollyo way ie search in a focussed, targeted and personalised manner? I was, and this is what I found.
Rollyo search rolls - a list of trusted sites
Rather than return 345600000 results for a topic covered by every man and his dog, Rollyo focuses on results limited to sites you trust. Easier done than said!
First step - the browser bar widget
Drag the widget at the end of this article into your browser bar.
Second step - create custom search rolls
When you come across a website that you like, click on the Rollbar widget. A window pops up.
Either create a new search roll, name it and add the site to it, or add the site to an existing search roll listed in the widget.
For heavy users, you could create 10 or 20 search rolls and populate them with sites you encounter on your travels. - for instance, create a search roll called serious search engines, and go add Google and all that jazz to it. Eventually you have a useful Search engine search roll, or a humor search roll with The Pisstakers at the top! a car search roll...
To do a web search
You can do a search at any time, of course, straight from the browser. As an example, I typed in RSS as a search word, and chose the search to take place in sites limited to Pisstakers funny search roll. Rollyo obediently searched my fave humor sites ONLY and I got results from authors who interested me - not the 3 million who don't. Great for researching topics in your clique, don't you think.
Rollyo targets search perfectly
I could have tapped into the serious search engines search roll to get general results on RSS from google and more mainstream search sites. Or if I wanted results limited to a search of cool car sites I visit often, I could have targeted a ferrari search roll... although, I wonder what RSS has to do with cars?
Bottom line, whenever you do a search, the results need only include info from the sites you trust! Cool huh!!! And it is free, and indexing is comprehensive and it all looks pretty..
If it made any sense, drag this Rollyo Rollbar link to your Bookmark Bar and see what funny stuff brings up in the web search results.
If you have reviewed or blogged about Rollyo, please contact Ed.and I will incorporate a link to it.
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Younanimous or Aftervote
Update
No sooner did we write up some info on the new meta search engine, Younanimous, than the developers unanimously decide that you need to know it henceforth as Aftervote. In this case, I dunno, calling a spade a spade sort of explains better what the search engine does, but Younanimous is so cool and so evocative. We blogged about naming Aftervote.
Updated update
Aftervote was bought out by some mogul and is now called Scour. It is slow to load, pays to search, and seems crap compared to what I reviewed below. So read on to see what seems to have been ruined!.
What does Aftervote / Younanimous do again?
It could be billed as: major web search engine aggregator meets Digg. I think it is easier to explain rather than summarize Aftervote.
When you search a word or phrase, Aftervote will return a couple of pages of results - admittedly a little slower than if you hit on Google direct, but still pretty nifty. With the results page up, the social side of
If you click on result 1 but it isn't what you want, you would backspace to the original page of search results. Aftervote makes a note of that.
If you follow through with search result number 2, or 5 or whatever, in the list, Aftervote remembers that. As a social search engine with a brain, it then applies your search dynamic to the results of the next person searching the same keyword you just did.
In this way, it is constantly modifying the returned results to be as useful and valid as possible (assuming users aren't mental and seek crap results for their queries!)
I must say I am quite impressed, especially as it does seem to produce a different result, (a more valid result?) as you re-search a term. A shame the logo is the wishy washiest yellow of all time, but to be fair, it is in Beta, so maybe it will get beefed up along with the search engine code.
A potted history in no particular order!
Thought Mechanics bring you information on Younanimous straight from the horse's mouth.
I am really excited to be talking about the release of this. Younanimous is a totally new search engine I have helped to develop. It has so many features and actually doesnt suck like most spin off engines. To read all of it, check the About Page. Some quick highlights:
Searches google, msn and yahoo
Mixes robot rankings with social rankings.
Has alexa, Pagerank and stumbleupon plugins
Much more..
John Chow review
Younanimous was reviewed in quite a lot of detail on the popular on-line money-making tech blog, a lot more detail than I just did. But then, there was $200 or so in the pot to espouse all the good, bad and different points, so I suggest you go for a look see at the minutiae! It is well written by a tech guru, but the quality of my screen shots pisses all over theirs!
Other links
Beertjes blog tells his side of the story in Dutch
Frantic Industries gives Younanimous the benefit of the doubt
The Techno Geek Boy has explained how Aftervote works too in an article AfterVote (a.k.a. Younanimous), The Hardest Working Engine in the Search Business
Maz, the developer behind Younanimous /Aftervote gets some good advice and suggestions from forum members. (Poor old Opera get a roasting though.)
)Yes, opera and safari fix is next, although its my true belief that there is more blind people than there is opera users (joking
If you have reviewed or blogged about Blingo, please contact Ed.and I will incorporate a link to it.
Technorati
Technorati were beta testing this powerful web search tool, a little search box acting as a window on a huge database of social networked data. Try it out and see where it takes you. Funny quotes or Pisstakers!!
Social bookmarking gives valued results
When people read about a topic or specific post that they like, they tell their friends at Technorati. Bloggers also link to posts and link to Technorati. Yadda yadda. Like a snowball in winter, as more people pick up on a topic, the more people roll with it and bookmark it and recommend it to internauters in ever greater numbers. The more votes a topic gets, the higher up the rankings it goes. (Like a snowball in hell, crap content gets burned too!)
Now the Technorati searchlet, by definition, produces search results that reflect the most read and valued content on the internet - as judged by readers. This approach is entirely different from traditional searching with Google, Yahoo etc who churn out search results based on what their robots have crunched through algorithmically, with sponsorship monies, and who knows what other random mathematical options factored in.
If you have reviewed or blogged about Technorati searchlet, please contact Ed.and I will incorporate a link to it.
Swicki
Swickis are a combination of a search engine & a wiki. Create tag clouds and customise search results, earn some adsense income...
The Pisstakers like the look and ethos of the swicki and use it as a primary search tool to discover the internet.
When you have a Swicki, you basically have a mini website that consists of content based on search results, comments on those search results, and modified search results. The more interaction and commenting and voting you have, the more relevant the page becomes to future searchers.
At one point our Swicki was worth over $1000 (theoretical) too, which may be an incentive to start your own Swicki and develop it!
And Alex offers brilliant customer support if you ever need it.
If you have reviewed or blogged about Swickis please contact Ed.and I will incorporate a link to it.
