Thing #12: Roll your own search tool with Rollyo

Do you have a group of websites that are your favorites? Or a set of online resources that are similar that you frequently use to answer homework or reference questions? Do teachers frequently ask you to recommned a few web sites for a specific assignment? Well Rollyo may be the tool for you. Rollyo allows you to create your own search tool for the just the websites you know and trust-with no programming required.Take a look at some of these search rolls that have already been created:

Public Domain e-Books Search
Quick Quotes

Explore other rolls here.

Not quite ready to roll? We've created a starter kit of Searchrolls you can personalize. What else can Rollyo do?
Share Your Searchrolls

You can explore and save searchrolls created by the community of Rollyo users and share your knowledge on a particular set of topics. You can even edit Searchrolls created by others. More than a thousand new Searchrolls are created every day!
Search Your Top News Sites and Blogs

Rollyo searches for the latest news articles and blog posts, giving you up-to-the-minute search results from the news sources you know and trust when it comes to a particular topic or area of interest.
RollBar

The RollBar Bookmarklet allows you to drag your entire Rollyo experience onto your browser. Search any site, use your Searchrolls wherever you are, add sites to your rolls on the fly, even create new rolls from the site that you're on.
Roll a Firefox™

Search Engine Firefox™ users can quickly create custom Searchrolls and add them to their browser toolbar in one click. You can include one site that you search all the time or a topical list of up to 25 sites. Any Rollyo Searchroll can be added to Firefox™ with one click.
High Rollers

Rollyo welcomes several high profile, High Rollers: Debra Messing, Arianna Huffington, Rosario Dawson, Brian Greene, Diane Von Furstenberg, our friends at PBS Frontline and many top bloggers have all rolled custom search engines. You can be a High Roller too if your searchroll becomes popular with the Rollyo community. Think of it as our version of Star Search.
Single Site Search

If you're always going back to the same site over and over again like Dictionary.com, Amazon or Ebay, you can create a searchroll that includes just that single site so all your searches are in one place.

Web Search

You can always expand any search to include the whole Web. With Rollyo you can search one site, the whole web, and everything in between.
Tools (from Rollyo)

"We are constantly adding new tools to make Rollyo more useful. A few of these include a Firefox™ Plugin, a custom searchbox for your site, our RollBar, and a simple way to import your bookmarks so you can use them to quickly create a variety of searchrolls. You can check out our excellent buzz and there's plenty more that you'll discover as you start using Rollyo. But ultimately Rollyo is really about a very simple idea: Quickly and easily getting you the results you want from the sites you trust." Ready?

Here’s a searchroll created for this workshop: Homework Help. Try a search for broad term like "math” or “history” to see results listed from multiple sites.


Discovery Activity:
Create your own customized search and write about it in your blog and post a link to it. See if this video (created by a Spring Branch ISD Library2Play workshop participant) will help you.