Week Five/Play Week: #11

The second lesson of Week Five/Play Week introduced me to an interesting little thing called Rollyo. Essentially, Rollyo is a searching tool that allows you to create your own personal search engines (teehee...roll your own...) with no programming required. You just name your search, list your preferred sites to search (up to twenty-five) , and Rollyo creates a little custom search engine for you. If you have no clue what/where you would like to search, Rollyo has created a list, or "starter kit," of Searchrolls that can be personalized by adding and/or deleting sites. You can create a Searchroll just for yourself, or you can "share the wealth" and make your Searchroll public, allowing others to use and benefit from it. You can create as many Searchrolls as you like, in addition to saving and editing (and thus "claiming for your own") the Searchrolls of others.

Inspired by a shopping Searchroll, I "rolled my own" search and created a Searchroll that will allow me to search a few sites that I trust enough to purchase snowboard gear from; I thought that this Searchroll could help me find out who has what without actually visiting these sites one by one. Here...have a look. I also added my Searchroll to my blog using the "Create a Searchbox" tool, per the Optional Discovery Exercise.

Kind of nifty...or so I thought. The problem comes in when I performed a search for Burton Stow Cargo Pants, an item I picked because I know at least a couple of the sites I chose for my roll carry these pants. I got 809 hits (from the five or six sites in my search), with the first three pages being the same site/same pant. Hmm...nifty, huh? Maybe it just doesn't work so well for shopping, or maybe I need to explore a bit more. I'm not giving up, but I'm not quite sure how useful Rollyo and Searchrolls could be based on my very limited--and not so shiny--experience.

I do think that, while maybe Rollyo isn't working for me, I will show it to some of our education majors. I know one of our student workers always returns to the same few sites for lesson plans, and I think Rollyo may prove useful to her. She could create a Searchroll for just those sites she trusts, and she would not be bombarded with thousands and thousands of hits in a search engine like Google, but she would also be spared the time it would take to search each of those sites individually. Maybe she could also use it in the classroom later...who knows!