Thing 9: create your own search engine

I found this "thing" quite frustrating.  I created my Rollyo (roll your own search engine) quite easily; I decided to create a search engine for the 23 things participant blogs.  I added the search box onto my blog and liked the look of it (reminds me of those sweets you can roll out).  I can see how this is really useful in this particular circumstance and for narrowing down searches.  For example: want to know what Westminster participants thought of Flickr? Do a search on my Rollyo and see everyone's Flickr related thoughts in one fell swoop.  Well, that's the theory.  I, like another Wmin23 participant, found that it was only retrieving results from a couple of the blogs (mine prominently), even though I knew it should retrieve more. 

Call it my generation Y tendencies but I wasn't going to sit there to figure out what was going on with this tool when a click away is Google......So next stop- Google customised search, same principle as the above but Google not Yahoo!  I have added the search box underneath the Rollyo one. I admit I have a slight love of all things Google and love adding extra Google tools to my portfolio but even trying to be unbiased the advantages for me were:

• I already have a Google account which I use for many tools and regularly so am unlikely to forget the username and password (tempting fate there)
• There didn't seem to be a limit to the number of sites to add to the custom search (unlike Rollyo's 25) although it's possible I just didn't hit the limit but it's certainly more
• You can colloborate so others can contribute sites to your custom search- which I think is an extremely useful feature
• It worked

I guess the last one is pretty essential.  I don't know what went wrong with the Rollyo one, maybe it was user error and maybe I'm missing something really obvious but still, if you search "Flickr" in the Rollyo one and then "Flickr" in the Google one you will see the difference (unless it really is just me.....).  The only gripe I have about adding the Google search box was that when I added the HTML coding to my blog it changed the main search box, the one that searches only my blog, to the style I had chosen for the customised search box.  Now it looks a bit weird and I can't change it.  But usability over aesthetics.  Also I did like the fact that for the Rollyo search box you can create different collections of websites and choose to search any of those collections from the one search box. 

Summary of thing 9: I liked the concept in theory, it works well for a scenario like this but I think the usefulness might be limited.  The tool let me down slightly but Google came to the rescue (as if they need the ego boost).  I guess for work I could collect together, for example, fashion websites and provide the narrowed down search for them.  Now talking of collecting websites together, I feel like another "thing" coming on......

Picture: crocuses in Harrogate taken by Ellie Murphy