I just found out about a pretty decent new web service called Rollyo, short for “Roll Your Own” - as in search engines. You can sign up for free there and create what they call “searchrolls” which consist of websites that you know and love. Add in your favorite domains, hit save, and then you can have a nice customized search tool delivering you results from sites you’ve already developed a bond with. Saves you time weeding through a bunch of trash on regular search results. But it’s also cool cause it lets you search through a particular community of websites that you may frequent. Check out their about page for more. (PS. They are apparently powered by Yahoo search results.)

If you want to check out how it works, I created a couple example search rolls for people to test out. One is called “Friends of Pop Occulture“. It includes my site, and selections from my blogroll and sites I read all the time. I also put together one called “Gnostic Blogs” which searches - guess what - gnostic blogs!

Also awesome is that you can browse and use other people’s searchrolls, and add in searchrolls to your searchbar if you’re using Firefox. There’s also an option to add a searchbox with your rolls onto your blog or website, but I wasn’t crazy about the code and appearance of it. So that might have to wait until later. In any event, definitely worth checking out, and seems like a cool new direction for searching online.

[via Mike Oliver]