Rollyo is one of those great ideas that seems to have flown under the radar: when you sign up and make your own account, you can make custom searchrolls. It works by letting you create a list of URLs, and then you can run searches within that congregated set of sites, rather than running tedious single-site searches or slogging through a general web search. There are millions of different searchrolls that people have created, for everything from helping with homework to getting video game cheats. The entire Rollyo site seems to be in beta phase yet, and it shows a bit: it can be kind-of difficult to navigate around the site, if you have a specific purpose in mind. For example, I made a quick Internet Games Rollyo, and then had to find a way to isolate the link to that particular searchroll so I could add it as a hyperlink. It took me several minutes to figure out, and had to be done very roundaboutly... so, even though Rollyo has plenty of searchrolls, its searching-for-searchrolls feature could use some work yet.
This whole site, though, could be endlessly useful for a library. Libraries could make (or use already-available) searchrolls for job help or job listings sites, ones that link to a bunch of different health or genealogy pages for easy metasearching, or juts do something fun like I did for games or activities. Promoting specific searchrolls could be a lot like promoting specific blogs or wikis: it can help users get easier access to large amounts of information, while still limiting it to specific, relevant, and useful results. Otherwise, libraries could just promote Rollyo as a whole, letting patrons choose their own searchrolls and run them as they please. In this regard, Rollyo stands out, since it lets you see which sites you're going to be searching for any given searchroll. Either way, it's definitely something to keep in mind as a good source of help for patrons.
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