I have yet to jump on the personal search engine thing. Rollyo looks awesome but I’ve just been unexcited about building my own search. And finally I think I’ve figured out why. Rollyo is trying to make me act like Yahoo. I don’t want to take the time to make a comprehensive web designer search or any kind of search for a category.
What I would like is to be able to comprehensively search my web history. Del.icio.us has a good start by letting you bookmark pages. I don’t know about you but I have not been putting in descriptions for for each link and some times I even skimp on tags just because I don’t want to put that much effort into it.
The less meta information I put in to del.icio.us the less useful del.icio.us is. What I really need is a way to easily search the sites, not the links, that I’ve entered in to del.icio.us.
The is where Rollyo’s limitations become more apparent. There is no way to mass upload links with any import function. On top of that who would really want to keep having to go back to Rollyo to re-upload links? What Rollyo needs (Or any site that would like to build this) is a way to create a search engine that subscribes to an RSS feed like my del.icio.us feed.
Another problem with Rollyo is how they treat your uploaded links:
Rollyo searches entire sites such as www.cnn.com or support.apple.com, but not parts of sites, such as www.cnn.com/politics/.
While the way Rollyo is set up that makes the most sense. But if it’s working off of my del.icio.us links then I most likely don’t want to search entire site and would instead like to just search the page I linked to. While I’m not sure about that assertion for every one I would like the ability to toggle between searching the entire site and the specified link.
Combining a custom search engine with an RSS feed of links would make a powerful search tool that could access your search history on a much deeper layer then del.icio.us allows. It might also encourage me to bookmark more sites that I wouldn’t bother with other wise. Then I could bookmark things with out worrying what the meta data is because I could just search for it later.
As far as I know there is no other site that comes close to this type of service and I think it would be interesting to see some one build something like this out.