Saturday, July 26, 2008

Week 5, Thing #12: Rollyo

I must say, part of the reason I stepped away from 2.0 for awhile was this week's topic. Perhaps I should learn how to just say, "not interested" rather than fretting over how I can best use every tool. Rollyo seems like overkill. Well-phrased search terms in Google will find what I want better than a roll in Rollyo.

I created a search for finding poetry, but it did not work very well. In my attempt to be inclusive, I had way too much , so the first hits always come back with dictionary definitions, reference books, etc. Try it and you'll see what I mean. I suppose, if a teacher had a specific topic with preferred sites, I could create a useful Rollyo. But on the fly, without inspiration, I was not impressed.

Powered by Rollyo



I also played with Google's Custom Search, and found it easier to work with. I input exactly the same search parameters and got much better results. I believe the reason for that is that Rollyo only searches by top-level domains, whereas Google allows deeper, more limited searching. Yes, the industry goliath triumphs again.