Rollyo

There’s a new player on the Web, Rollyo, aiming to become useful to the many — and it just may succeed. The idea is that, after registering (natch), you insert up to 25 URLs that Rollyo will search using Yahoo Search, providing you with a select database that you can then consult in the future. The concept is good, if unnecessary. That is, a plain old entire web search, if decently constructed or aimed at something that the relevance machines will seize on right away, will throw up the results you want just as easily. But nobody but ours truly and our kind actually frames a search carefully, so this lets mere mortals avoid some of the excesses that the search giants like to wow us with.

Note that the design and construction of Rollyo is truly great, no small matter in a web construct: it’s simple, plain, and makes effective use of Javascript. Moreover, it harnesses the latest internet enthusiasm, mass participation and sharing. This is clearly due to be bought out for more than a dollar by… Yahoo, I’d guess.

Speaking of mass participation and sharing, here’s a challenge for Slawyers, official or otherwise: I’ve created an account on Rollyo, username slaw password ohcanada. Log in and lets construct a Rollyo of the best 25 sites to search for Canadian law. If things get congested, we can always spawn mini Rollyos.

By the way, this is a warm up exercise for a challenge I want to pose to Slawyers in the near future (so get limbered up). The task is to devise the best search for Google that will throw up as many sites relevant to Canadian law as possible and only such sites. I reckon it’ll take a Google account to do it, because there’s a limit on the number of search terms you can use otherwise. The notion is to make this an “open sourceâ€? search project, one we can prune and curry as we go along.

But first there was Rollyo.